The Transmigration of Souls (46 page)

Edgar said, “Over there.” Pointing.

Others turning to look.

Kincaid said, “Some kind of aircraft, climbing up toward us...”

Al: “They’d have to be... pretty sophisticated to reach this altitude.”

“Sophisticated or not,” said Edgar, “those are the first aircraft we’ve seen in the World other than our own.” Frowning now, watching them climb.

Ling picked up a pair of binoculars kept handy in the cockpit and focused them on the climbing planes. Two of them. Small. Single-engine. Prop drive. Open cockpits... “An antique design, I think. Older than this one.”

Edgar took the binoculars and looked. “A little like a P-shooter, maybe. They’ll never get up here.” The floor was tilting under them now as Edgar turned into a long, spiraling climb, up toward the mouth of the glowing mountain.

Kincaid, watching the little planes circle helplessly, far below, said, “P-shooter. That would be the pre-World War II P-26?”

Edgar said, “I keep forgetting you were born not long after my time.”

Brilliant flashes from around the edge of the mountain, hundreds of kilometers away. “Over there.”

Edgar leveled the binoculars and looked. “I’ll be damned. Aircraft attacking a city by the sea. No, not the city. Ships in its harbor. I’ll be damned.”

“Can we take a look?”

Edgar said, “We don’t have time for that.” Handing him the binoculars. “This’ll have to do.”

Time? Why is there no time? We have all the time there is. But the sense of... hurry remains.

He put the binoculars to his eyes and looked. Little prop-driven airplanes swooping low out of the water. Black objects falling. Dropping into the sea, going on, leaving white trails of submerged foam, white trails ending at the hulls of big black ships, ships exploding, great gouts of fire, black smoke rising toward the pale blue sky.

I wonder who they are? I wonder why they’re fighting? I’ll never know.

The B-36 leveled off, circled once out over the sea, turned back toward the mountain, banking, begin a slow, shallow dive. Ling Erhshan looked up, startled, into the mountain’s brilliant, empty mouth.

What if this
is
Heaven? He thought. What if that’s Hell? But the people below, fighting, trying to kill each other in a place where no one could die. Heaven? No. Better that we go on.

o0o

One last view, Sergeant-Major Astrid Kincaid, leaning forward in her jumpseat, pulling at the harness she’d only just remembered to fasten, leaning close, pressing her face to the cold plexiglass of the cockpit window, looking down into featureless, blue-violet nothing.

One more, final, stupid act. Somewhere along the way, I lost my sense of what was real. There’s nothing down there. Nothing but white light and death. In a moment, I will feel the fire burn me up. A moment after that and I’ll awaken, back on the high plains of Great Achaea. What then? Walk back to High America? Why? There nothing there. Go down the River of No Return? Nothing there either. Nothing anywhere.

One God-damned almighty cold realization: No matter what I do, I can’t escape this. I go on and on and on. No way to end it now, for I’ve already died. Remote, cold wish, forlorn hope: Maybe I will wake up. Maybe it’s all been a dream. Maybe I’m still in...

No. Not in Fortress America. Nothing there but more useless eternity. Pray you wake up in your bed again, wake up once more a little girl, with a whole, finite life ahead of you. Pray it comes out differently, this time.

Pray that you live your one life well.

Pray that nothing goes to waste.

Al pulled back on his control yoke, heeled the plane over on one wing, chopped the throttle, opened the speed brakes, pushed the yoke down again and nosed them over in the direction of bright blue hell.

One final, stark thought, as the mountain’s mouth opened to engulf them: What if he’s behind me now, wandering the world without end? And what if I don’t come back?

Ten. The End of the Passage.

Elements of a final theory.

It has been, is, will be, forever and ever frustrating to realize that, though I seem to be, really feel that I
am,
all knowing and all powerful, there remain things beyond my reach.

What sort of things could be beyond the reach of God Almighty?

Well. I am not God Almighty, merely the infinitely lesser being who sits in the Command Module, parks his fat ass on the Throne and operates the light show, blows the smoke and tilts the mirrors. Like a poor man driving a rusted out old Cadillac Coupe de Ville with a quarter-million miles on the odometer, all I can do is imagine elegance, while the old gas-guzzler eats up my meager pay.

Know all things, direct all paths?

Nonsense.

I know the byways of the Multiverse and nothing more.

What lies beyond, out of sight, far, far beyond my limited reach... nothing, not even a void. The lightless, unreal blind spot of total ignorance. Sometimes, I imagine getting out there, getting out of here, following in what I presume are the footsteps of the Old Man and, before Him, the Great Mother, going on out into the void, finding out the Truth.

And I have a terrible fear. That same old fear. Going out of the Multiverse, giving up what I
know
, going on beyond the blank veil into... my God, the one I used to imagine as a child. Isn’t that the same thing as death?

That’s not the worst of it, though. The Great Mother, the Old Man God... I know they didn’t create the Multiverse. I know they were just part of the Machine, wherever they’ve gone. No more than my predecessors, I suppose.

Somewhere. Somewhere beyond all knowledge, I image some Thing I call, for lack of a better term, simply the Other. The one great Eka-God, the One Who Makes All the Rules and Is Allowed to Change Them. The one who sets parameters for what I’ve called the Probability Manager, in line with the software Toolbox terminology made up when we thought we understood what the Gates and Scavengers and Colonials and the whole impossible tapestry of the Multiverse was all about.

Sometimes I imagine, horribly, that the Other is no more than some lost wayfarer, just like me, some Being wandering the byways of his larger eka-Multiverse, looking for the exit, looking for some way home. Would that be a satisfactory answer? Of course not. Great Gods have Bigger Gods upon Their Backs to Bite ‘em, and Bigger Gods larger still...

What does it mean for something to have no beginning and no end?

Even now, I don’t know.

Where do Almighty Gods go when their Time is up?

I’m terribly frightened that one day I’ll find out.

Terrible groaning, shuddery, echoing through the byways of the Multiverse now, Archangel Bob trying to get the Jug started, cursing the trillion-year-old junk that’s all we have to work with. Billions, trillions, quadrillions of adoring helpers fluttering round his ectoplasm, all useless.

A great clashing of time-frames, universes destroyed in a squealing of meshed probabilities. The Jug rumbles to life, is backed out of its storage quantum, goes scraping off to the task of Rectification. Over the noise and racket and commotion, you can hear the Archangel Bob singing lustily to himself. It’s the Seven Dwarves’ Song.

Now I hunker down to begin the work of Judgment Day.

Edgar, little Edgar, like a bright, shining seed out there, shining against the twisting black backdrop of the Multiverse. Edgar the Rebellious Angel, walking in the footsteps of old Lucifer, thinking he brought light and life to the world but... there was a reason for Prometheus’s punishment. It wasn’t because the gods were jealous of his gift. It was because he committed a crime, because he brought down evil on the innocent.

I’ve always despised the way the Old Man punished Adam and Eve for succumbing to the temptation he laid in their way. Entrapment is an ugly thing.

Well, Archangel Edgar, you sought the Job for yourself, fought with Archangel Bob when he came on the scene, lost the battle, Fell. And now, out in the Multiverse, you covet and scheme and labor to rise, rise again into Heaven and cast down all of God’s Work, the Opus Dei you thought to own.

Won’t you be surprised when you find out whose got your spot?

Edgar laboring away, all those many iterations slowly gathering together, absorbed into one another. Absorbed and re-emitted, bouncing back and forth, gathering force like a primitive laser beam bouncing back and forth in its ruby rod... but we’re only waiting, Edgar. Waiting patiently for you to come.

And, of course, now I must consider the matter of lovely little Astrid Astride. Loose in the Multiverse though no fault of her own, responding merely to a temptation laid in her path by some Almighty villain. Me.

Must I punish her?

The rules say yes.

And I’m not the one who writes the rules.

It’d be nice if I could think of a way out.

Look around you, Mister God Almighty Probability Manager.

Ah.

Of course.

Eleven. Down the Rabbit Hole.

Falling
!

Like... thought Ling Erhshan, like I’m back in orbit. Zero gee, objects floating before my face, bits and pieces of scrap, things left behind by technicians we hadn’t suspected of such carelessness, rising up from their resting places, behind control consoles, under storage lockers... I can feel my insides floating up from their little beds, beds of fat and suddenly unstressed tissue, head suddenly full, nausea reaching out its feather-light touch...

Look out the window. Is that Earth down below? Chang, Da Chai and I circling in orbit, mated to the tanker pumping our fuel aboard, preparing to leave for the Moon...

Surely they live again, somewhere in Heaven?

Out the window, though, only blue-white light, light so bright it was without form, a window into the void. Light so bright it left only darkness behind... or like a dream I once had. I’d been flying a lot, riding military transport around Siberia, setting up my various resources, get the Program started. Shaky old planes, the sort of thing a low-priority academic project could requisition. Sitting there, in my dream, belted securely into my airline seat, plane shuddering around me, plane banked hard to the right, angling down out of the sky to a snowcovered landscape, things rattling and crashing around me, people screaming, screaming.

Me, looking out the window, watching the ground heel hard over as it came up into the sky, reaching for us, thinking, No. This can’t be happening. I must be having a dream...

Then looking at my seat mate, some young staffer I barely knew, her eyes wide, shocked, looking at me, looking right into my soul. I could read her mind, for just a moment: Please. Tell me this is just a dream.

Scream of tearing metal, crackle of breaking wings, thud of fuel ignition, seats tearing from their mounts, tumbling forward into flaring white light... I remember seeing her fly away. Remember seeing her torn asunder, eyes unchanged, shock of disbelief fixed for eternity. Remember my last thought, regret, wishing I could reach out and touch those soft young limbs...

Hand reaching out, warm hand on my arm, hand reaching to me out of the impenetrable black light, blinding light and darkness all run together in my heart. Ling said, “Kincaid...”

Patting him on the arm, she said, “You were making... noises.”

Noises. I remember waking up in my sweaty bed, whimpering, clutching a damp pillow to my breast. Another hand on my arm then. The girl from the dream. One of my graduate students. I don’t remember her name. “Sorry. Are we blind?”

Soft laughter. “I don’t think so. I think it just got dark so fast our eyes didn’t know what to make of it.”

From the front of the cabin, Edgar’s voice: “Well, God damn it, Al, is there air out there or not?”

Al, voice... delicate: “Well now. I don’t know.” Soft creaking noise. “When I work the yoke and rudder pedals, I don’t feel any non-mechanical resistance. We could be sitting on the runway. Or floating in a vacuum.”

Ling thought, Complete darkness. No gravity. No air. No nothing. “Floating in an... empty plenum?”

Murray said, “The thought has crossed our minds, I think.”

Edgar: “Why have the engines stopped? They’re nuclear-electric, not dependent on air for their operation.”

No vibration beneath their feet, coming through their seats. I wonder what’s happening to the folk in back? Would we be able to hear them through the hatch. Someone should...

Gerry said, “I don’t know. We can’t see the instruments...”

“Well? Turn on the fucking panel lights.”

A brief silence, then: “There aren’t any. Cabin lights neither.”

A sharply hissed sigh of exasperation: “Why the fuck
not
?”

Gentle laughter from Al: “When was the last time you remember it being dark in the World Without End? There were plenty of windows. We didn’t think...” Right. Even up on Mike’s Peak, under a black and pseudo-starry sky, full daylight blazing down.

“Hmh. Fucking
great
.” And a voice-tone that said:
Now
what?

Murray: “There’s a switch on the underside of the yoke column, Al. We did put in small landing lights.”

“What for?”

 Gerry: “Cloudy days.”

Ling thought, But I don’t remember seeing any clouds...

Murray: “Fog lights, really. Not much more than that.”

Ling heard the dull crack of the switch, a sense, almost, of an echo.

Diffuse orange light coming in through the windshield, outlining the heads and shoulders of the others, black forms superimposed on hazy night and...

Al’s voice, raised on high, pitch winding up through the scale from a thick and gargling scream: “
Fürgrossekackenscheiss’gibs’herrgott
!!”

Kincaid’s echoing whisper: “Holy fuck.”

Misty orange light reflecting back at the from, what? A wall? A dark, shiny wall? Outlined against it, Ling could see Al more or less standing up in his harness, standing on the rudder pedals, wall before them tilting crazily, hauling on the yoke, pulling it against his chest, wall flattening out, stretching away to infinite distance, orange light, barely a glow, fading away.

Murray said, “I can’t get the engines to come on...” A look out the window, back aft, motionless props, not feathered, not windmilling, reflecting orange forward. “Dead circuit indicator.”

Edgar: “For Christ’s sake. Try to put the gear down.”

Metal switches going
tick-tock
. Silence.

“Jesus. Can you keep her level? Where the Hell is that God damned crank...”

Plane softly shuddering. Light from outside growing brighter. Al: “No, I can’t keep her level. Hold on.”

The props touched first, a magnified scream of fingernails on blackboard.

o0o

Kincaid stood looking back at the crash-landed airplane from a little way off across the darkling plain, listening to her breath whisper through the oxygen-assisted respirator’s valve,
shush
in,
snap
, hiss out, hose running down to a little oxygen tank and rebreather canister clipped to her belt, M-1 clutched across her chest.

A little air here, Al and the boys, the Unholy Trinity, mumbling over their instruments, muttering to each other, Edgar snarling at them over the issue of panel lights. For Christ’s
sake
. We were going into the fucking
unknown
...

Cold here, around minus forty, near where Fahrenheit and Celsius meet, air pressure low, maybe 400 millibars, skin tingling, ears popping every time she swallowed. Sounds muffled. No wind though. Good damned thing. These cotton-batting-lined wool coats are piss-poor.

Plane resting on its belly, suffused by orange light, props bent, dug into the... substrate. Stuff like formica, but, waxier, softer. Murray kneeling, looking into the long troughs they’d dug, scraping and clattering to a stop.

A soft mutter, fingering grit. Reminds me of that black wax we had in biology class.

You mean, said Edgar, the stuff we’d pin frogs too?

Yes.

Evocation of a brief memory: Holding a shivery green leopard frog in her left hand, the long needle with its wooden handle in the other. Some male teacher, thin, young, approaching her, surgical scissors in his hand, eyes on her breasts. Scissors at the back of the frog’s neck. Frog motionless. Seeming apathetic.
Snip
.

Teacher patting me on the shoulder, and you could see him wishing for the nerve to accidentally touch my tits...

OK, Astrid. Go to it. He won’t feel a thing.

Frog just doesn’t seem to care.

Putting the needle into the hole. Running it up into the skull, wagging it back and forth. Nothing. How would I feel if someone just scrambled my brain? OK. Now, the spine. Slide the needle home...

Frog suddenly squirming in her hand,
screaming
, all the agonies of a soul in Hell...

Falling with a splat to the floor. Blood on her hands.

Don’t be such a sissy, Astrid. Now put him in the pan and get to work.

Pins through his hands, pins through his feet, sliding on down to the soft black wax.

People around the sprawling, crashed plane. We’d never get it aloft now, even if we get the electrical system working again. Stuck here. People huddled around the plane, looking off into the empty distance. Edgar, the boys, walking round and round, making their bitter survey. Genda and Amaterasu, holding hands. Laing and Rahman, holding hands. Ling standing alone. Amanda Grey standing alone.

Me standing alone. What if we’re stuck here? What if this is all there is? Walk to the end of the world? What if it has no end?

Edgar saying, What the Hell? We’ll run out of food and water and air eventually. Probably just reify somewhere near the River and...

What if we can’t die here?
The Rapture
? How long do I have to stay here, God?
Forever
.

A muffled outcry, from back at the plane. Someone, Laing, pointing up into the black sky. Kincaid turned to look. A bright spark, isolated. Like a single star. Moving. Growing larger? Coming toward us? I can’t tell.

Another spark. Then another. Another. Ten. Twenty. A hundred. A thousand. Familiar scene, forming in her mind. The worst of it coming true then, the rules clustered round the concept of Hesperidia coming true, Lord Ahriman forming around them. In a moment, the stars would be bursts of fire. Bursts of fire turning to fiery birds, birds assembling into some nightmare angel...

Laing’s cry ringing out.
No
. Long, drawn out, unhappy. A glance back and Laing had fallen against Rahman, fallen against the woman’s protecting bosom. And, in the sky...

A sharp sense of being out of breath. Expecting to look up and see that the Angel of Death had formed again, formed to carry us away, roll us up like windowshades, leaving dry bones behind, little piles of dry bones to rest beside the plane, mute witness to our...

Little sparks of light above them, motionless but... moving, sparks of white light resolving into tiny coils, tiny coils spinning round and round, held fast to their axes, each image reflected into every other image, each fiery double helix the same.

Suddenly beside her, Ling whispered, “They look like little men. Like little soldiers, marching in place.”

She stared at them, wondering. Sound in the distance. Wind rushing through the tops of trees in the late summer. Sigh of the wind presaging Fall.

Rahman was standing with them now too, leading a downcast Laing by the hand. She said, “Almost like a choir singing. Singing far away in the distance. When I was a girl, I would sometimes go down to the Christian quarter on Sunday. Would stand outside a church and listen to them sing, so different from the songs of Islam.”

Ling: “Or like men whistling. Whistling as they march.”

One of the coils seemed to expand suddenly. Expand or merely grow closer? Impossible to know.

Voice, like a whisper inside their heads:
You have no business here
.

Behind the coil, the little helixes did indeed look like marching soldiers now. No. Not soldiers. Marching marionettes. Naked things, sexless things, things made of white light. A little like the way Amaterasu looked, before I put on her skin and organs...

Edgar, shouting: “Who are you?”

A Mediator
.

Mediator no more than a coil of misty light, coiling in on itself, round and round...

It said,
The Soldiers of the Light were to guard against this, but they fail, as everything fails, in time
.
The Princes of the Worlds have sent me here to Mediate your... return
.

Return. She called out, “To where?”

Home? Will it send us home? Home to try again, to try... I don’t know. I don’t know what we were meant to be. If anything.

Edgar shouted, “We don’t want to go back to the World Without End! There’s nothing there for us!” Nothing there for anyone whose never been... content.

The Mediator said,
The World Without End is no more, all its souls fallen into darkness
.
Your crossing of the Boundary saw to that
.

Moment of freezing shock. All its souls fallen... Eternal life lost? Because of us? One word, bitter, hard, a word without end:
Unfair
. But, when you act, you incur responsibility.

In a whisper: “Where, then?”

I know not
.

Back at the crashed plane, the hatch suddenly popped back open, built-up air pressure chuffing, air sighing out into the void. Us? Back in there?

No
.
Not all of you
.
Only the three, not the One
.

Edgar cried out, “Are you God?”

Not God
.
A Mediator between the Worlds
.

Kincaid suddenly conscious that Al, Murray and Gerry were standing together, postures stiff and unnatural, three little robots standing in a row. Al’s voice, as if talking to himself: “No. This is not right.”

Wandering Jews
.

Flying Dutchmen
.

All the same
.

Al: “
Verdammt noch mal
!”

Beside him, Murray said, “Damned and stitched, I’m afraid...” Not afraid, though. Voice... resigned. And they turned, together, as one, marching in step, marched into the plane and were gone. In a minute, you could see their heads appear in the cockpit windows, taking their seats, looking out into the darkness.

Edgar shouted, “What the Hell is going on here?”

A groan of metal from the crashed plane. A scrape. Another. It started to slide, slide back along its own long skidmark, faster and faster, shriek of its passage growing louder and louder. Behind Rahman, Kincaid could see Laing cowering, holding her hands over her ears.

Plane in the sky now, rising, flying backwards for a moment, then banking, turning away from them, nose rising, pointing at the black heavens, a twinkle of torn metal, wings bent and graceless, growing smaller against the darkness, smaller and smaller still, a bit of flotsam, miniature junk, a glitter like a bit of lost Christmas tinsel blowing on the wind, then gone.