The Transmigration of Souls (45 page)

Edgar said, “Later on, we brought in turbocharged tractors, wound up putting in an air liquification plant so we could feed the tractor engines from oxygen tanks. Took a while, but we got everything built...”

Out of nowhere, the mountainside seemed to sprout a little city, a town really, cluster of white buildings around what looked like small runway. Things like cars. Buildings without windows though...

Edgar suddenly turned in his seat, forgetting her. “God damn it, Al, you’re coming in too...”

The mountainside seemed to swell suddenly, runway sliding under them, white concrete going by beneath the plane’s fragile hull entirely two fast. Hydraulic whine, a triple thump, gear going down and locking into place. Jesus Christ, talk about last second, like those old Shuttle pilots, from when my parents were young, hypersonic gliders dropping on the desert...

Bang. Solid jar making her teeth snap together lightly. Not ready for it. Damn well know not to let your mouth hang open in a combat situation. Getting careless in your old age.

Rattle-squeal of metal parts trying to fly apart, roar coming through the structure of the aircraft, shuddering, shuddering, pitch of the props most likely reversed now, blowing air hard forward, slowing them down... they seemed to be heading right for one of the buildings.

Kincaid thought of trying to hold on for just a second, then relaxed. Nobody panicking here but us greenhorns. Look at the three of them. Grinning, for Christ’s sake. Boys with toys.

The plane rolled to a stop, rocking back and forth on its hydraulic shock absorbers, its glass nosecap maybe three meters from the nearest white wall. Edgar said, “We call this place the Second Floor. Come on back. We’ll get some oxygen masks and go outside.”

Al said, “Bundle up, children. A little nippy up here.”

o0o

Cog railway then, to the top of the mountain, Edgar telling them they’d thought of extending it down to the zeppelin base, make it easier to get cargo up here, but... “Tribesmen down on the Psaltry Plateau are pretty damn bold. Got up as far as the original base camp once already. We’ve had to put in more defenses than we like, just to keep the tractor head open. Maybe, when we’ve built a few more cargo versions of the ole
36
, here, we can forget about the rest of it.”

Naked tribesmen, however hardy, would not be climbing to an airport crouching at the 50,000-foot mark. As they rode up the mountain, snug in a pressurized car, the view to the east grew no more splendid, grew no more details, flat slab of silver ocean merely growing larger, stretching on out, farther and farther away. Something in the distance?

Edgar said, “It’s there, all right. Just not enough color to it. Not enough contrast. The scopes up top,” thumb toward the sky, “give us a pretty good view. You can see there’re mountains and rivers and things.”

Ling asked, “Vegetation?”

A frown. “Maybe. A lot of the landscape appears to be sort of reddish orange. With all the rivers, it’s unlikely to be desert.”

Kincaid said: “Maybe it’s Fall there all the time. How long would it take you to fly over in the
36
?”

“Seventeen hundred hours.”

Not quite seventy-one days. “So why haven’t you gone?”

“We sent a zeppelin over about 20 years ago, back before we got the scopes up, when we only suspected there might be another continent out there. It would’ve taken them maybe two years to make the round trip. But they never came back.”

Ling said, “How did you manage to make an airship that could fly for two years on a single load of fuel?”

Kincaid: “You people have been here for, what? Three hundred years? Why’re these things happening only now?”

A smile. “Three hundred years ago it was me and Otis and a few others putting up a log fort near the edge of the plateau, calling ourselves High America and trying to keep the Amazulu from throwing us out. Took a while to build the rest.”

Ling, voice hushed: “That must have been... an adventure.”

Edgar’s smile was crooked: “You could look at it that way.”

You could. Kincaid thought, Boys with toys. Ling’s eyes shining, full of... old imaginings. Where have my old imaginings gone? Melted away over the years. I grew old, sitting home in Fortress America. Old. And what if we hadn’t gone to the Moon? Not just now, but back then. What if there’d been no American Renaissance? I’d’ve grown old just the same. Grown old and died. Sudden, pale shock: Grown old. And died. And come right here. Come here with all my friends.

o0o

The top of the mountain was another pale shock, the cog train rolling over the rim, sky black above them, densely spangled now with what looked like a hundred thousand dim, fuzzy stars, stars clotting the whole width of the sky from horizon to... Well. No. Just covering the whole width of the sky, fuzz-spangled sky seem to reach out forever, never quite coming down to meet the unending bright landscape below.

And what do I see out there. Down there? Nothing. Bright blue nothing. Day sky hanging under the night, two sheets of differentiated light stretching out to... to nowhere.

Flat tableland up here, millions of hectares of flat, bare gray rock. White domes nearby, at the head of the cog railway. Familiar slit observatory domes, big tubes poking out of them, some looking up, others looking... away. Ling, pointing, said, “And that?”

Shapes in the distance, tens of kilometers away, dark, skeletal shapes, cast in shadow. Edgar said, “Ah, the Krautmeister Empire.”

Tousle-haired Al, gazing soberly out at the infinite distance below, said, “You really shouldn’t call them that, Ed.” Voice disapproving, reproving in a distant sort of way.

“Why the Hell not? I’ve been calling them that for two, three hundred years now...”

“Still...” Al said, “That’s Wernher’s bailiwick. He and his friend Krafft have been... building a rocket.”

Ling sitting forward now. “A rocket.”

Wan smile from Edgar. “Even I knew you couldn’t put something in orbit here...” Of course not. Flat. The World Without End is flat.

Al said, “They brought the designs with them in their heads when they died.”

Edgar: “And they’ve been arguing, ever since. Wormer wants to call it the Saturn C-8, Krafty keeps plumping for Nova.”

“Please.” Al said, “They think its a quick way to fill in local exploration, fill in gaps left by the scopes. The vehicle can reach one million kilometers altitude, or two million fired for range.”

Edgar said: “In about six months, they’re going to put a robot probe down on Orange East. A small, teleoperated dirigible, with a couple of retrievable surface probes. Little tanks. Hell. Maybe they’ll even find out what happened to old Bill and Merry.”

Al: “They were old-fashioned, Edgar. They preferred to be called William and Merriweather.” He said, “Some time next year, they’re going to lift one of our telescopes straight up on a sounding flight. That’ll give us a much better perspective on some of the more distant objects...”

Eventually, the train took them through the airlock of a pressurized terminal.

o0o

Ling said, “I should’ve anticipated this. Somehow, I was visualizing old-style astronomers, bundled up in greatcoats, huddling over eyepieces, working with glass plates, maybe.”

Al said, “Is that the way they do things in your Green China?”

“Well, no, but this place is so... antique.”

Edgar said, “In any case, there’s no air up in the dome. Even if we didn’t want to keep the mirrors clean, it’d still rush out every time...” Image of the dome sliding open and greatcoated astronomers blowing right out.

Now, they sat before a two-meter wide television screen, a relatively-crude projection affair, while Al and Edgar worked a control panel, some joysticks, mainly, and an alphanumeric keyboard. Edgar said, “Some fellows showed up in High America a couple of months ago. Told us they can build some kind of mind-brain interface for computers. Hard for me to imagine.”

Kincaid said, “Even in the Fortress, immortals sometimes get killed.”

Al said, “We were starting to wonder. Pickings have gotten rather... slim, these last few decades. We were quite overjoyed when one of our agents radioed home that rumors were circulating about you folks having arrived at the River.”

Edgar said, “There. This is an island, out on the Western Sea, maybe forty thousand miles from here.”

Island rising from the sea. Something like a volcano. Not a volcano though, jagged cone more like a regular mountain, with the top ripped open, blue-violet light spilling out.

Edgar: “Just an ordinary little island, maybe the size of Sicily, mountain no more than sixty thousand feet. No sweat at all for the good, old
36
.”

Al said, “We’re stopping here so I can take a few readings with our newer instruments before going on. Some of the earlier measurements suggested more intense ionizing radiation than we’d be comfortable with.”

Kincaid: “So what? We’re dead.”

Edgar laughed: “Getting used to the idea, are you?”

Al: “Your tissues would melt away eventually. You’d wind up reifying somewhere else.”

Edgar: “Besides which,
36
is neither immortal nor invulnerable.”

Ling: “What do you think it is?”

Edgar: “Symmes’ Hole.”

Al: “Foolishness.”

Edgar said, “It’s just a bit of shorthand. We think it’s the way out. We’ve been looking at it for some time now. Planning what to do, arguing about... well, ways and means, ifs and whens.”

“The way out to where?”

A smile, “Well, that was the question, until you folks showed up. Murray kept insisting it was just a crustal rip, exposing the underlayers of the event horizon. Hawking Backscatter leaking through maybe.”

“And now?”

A shrug. “I’ve listened to your tale. We all have. If there are things like your stargates here, we haven’t found them. If there’s a way out, out into your Multiverse, it’d have to be something like this.”

“Pipe dream,” said Al.

“Maybe so. Maybe everything
is
an accident. But if it’s not... Hell. There’s got to be a watchmaker somewhere.”

Kincaid: “What if you’re wrong? What if it’s just a radioactive hole in the ground?”

Another shrug. “That’s been the argument all along! Hell, we’ve been shouting at each other for decades, Hell,
centuries
, about whether this is
it
. If I’m wrong, if this is
it
, the End of the Road, the Final Place, what have you, if we’re just fucking vaporized when we fly down that glowing hole, then, when I reify, I’ll walk back home to High America and take my lumps. Then try something else. Hell, people, we’ve got fucking
forever
to screw around in!”

Al murmured, “Spoken like a true American.”

Ling said, “What if it
does
go... somewhere else? What then?”

Long silence. Then Gerry whispered, “Well, I always was upset about dying just when I did. Maybe...”

Al, German accent very soft, said, “It doesn’t matter where it goes. So long as it
goes
. None of us wants to spend Eternity
here
. It’s why we were looking for the... for the Egress, you see, all along.”

Ling thought, Of course.

o0o

Now, below, the silver ocean was a featureless blue venue only a little darker than the sky. If there were clouds above, Rahman thought, it would reflect them. Then... Not really so different. Sky over sky still. But at least the moving cloud images would lend some feeling of progress. Thirty thousand English miles from the western shores of vast, nameless continent — I still think of it as Heaven — to the glowing island. Close to fifty thousand kilometers.

A hundred hours. Only a hundred hours over the trackless waste. Four days and a little bit. If we still had days. She’d been spending more and more time alone, crawling back through the heavily-shielded tunnel that bypassed the reactor amidships, crawling over the cargo stores, the humming machinery of the airplane’s primitive life-support system, back to the tail gunner’s blister.

Heavy equipment here. A quad of 50-caliber machine guns that could be aimed slightly upward, as well as aft. A single, long-barreled aerial cannon that could fire downward.

Edgar smiling when she asked. We’ve got a ball turret in the belly, side mounted weaponpacks, a chin turret, one ventral... You never know.

Laing sat and watched the empty sea recede. And waited. Down the hole. Down the Rabbit Hole. Is that what we’re doing? Why? Because some people can never be... content? A crawling sense of unease, but... that’s why
I’m
here, isn’t it? Why I went to University, pretended to be a Lesbian, never married, joined the space program, went on up to the Moon and...

In the Name of God.
I’m
the one who led us through the stargate. I’m the one who turned it on, stepped through to another world, led us on out into the Multiverse and... what was
I
looking for?

I remember the crawling sense of raw
excitement
I felt when the first stargate opened on that impossible new world, Mars-Plus, yellow hills under a red sky. I remember thinking, This now.
This
is what you’ve been looking for all along.

Mars-Plus. The Permian.
Crimson Desert
. Hesperidia. God’s Machine. This strange and so-absurd World Without End.

Now, down the hole, and away again. To where? To yet another Multiversal world where things will be strange and different, yet forever the
same
. No way to know. Only wondering left inside.

She sat and watched the sea recede. And waited.

o0o

Plane banking in over the coast of the blue island now, slopes of the mountain clad in turquoise forest, blue water lapping at silver-white beaches, Ling Erhshan looking out of the cockpit window, entranced. Like paradise? No. Like an alien world, like I...

Sharp reality intruding. As if it’s all new, myself reborn, the alien worlds I’ve really seen almost forgotten. I’ve been to the Moon, traveled through time to the Permian, fallen down through endless dimensions, died the real death from which no one returns and...