The Transmigration of Souls (48 page)

“Will do, Capcom.”

Rahman turned her head, looking back into the command module’s cramped cabin space. Crowded as Hell in here. Since they installed two more seats, bolting them in under the original three, you could hardly budge. Especially when all five of us are in here together...

The woman at the radio console, a short, thick-waisted blonde, namestripe on her shirt reading Smithfield, smiled at her. “Good morning, sleepyhead!”

Rahman said, “Good morning, Nellie.” Nellie. Her name is Nellie...

Across the cabin, only four feet away, a small, gray-haired man in his late forties floated by the other window, looking out, looking down at the world. Jim Jameson living out his dream, JPL’s first astronaut, on his way to the Moon.

Nellie said, “Something wrong, Susan?”

Rahman stretched, arched her back, bumped her head on the seat’s headrest. Opened her eyes again and looked down. The namestripe on her own shirt read
Romano
. Susan Romano. Rahman? What the Hell was I thinking? She said, “I had the strangest damned dream.”

From beside the window, Jameson said, “Zero gee’ll do that.”

“Or that godawful pizza we had last night.”

Susan said, “Well. Microwave’s better than the old freeze-dried stuff, but NASA’s got a long way to go.” Funny to think about it that way. A long way to go. Hah. She unbuckled her harness and slid away from the acceleration couch, hanging in the air, reaching for docking tunnel hatch. Plenty to do in the orbital habitat, getting ready for LOI. They’d be the first in Lunar polar orbit, if nothing went wrong. And when
25
shows up with the Block 5 lander, some of us will be the first to set down at the North Pole...

Nellie said, “Better not. Jill and Frazier decided they needed a little privacy.”

Astonishment. “
Frazier
?”

Holding onto a support stanchion, bobbing in mid air, half an arm’s length away, Nellie laughed. “I guess Jill decided if she couldn’t be the first woman to do it on the Moon, she could at least be the first to do it in deep space...”

Jill Mathers could sometimes be an asshole indeed, with her glory-hog concerns about
firsts
. All right, first in deep space, but... “
Frazier
?”

A shrug. A grin.

From his window seat, Jameson said, “Sorry you married a ground-pounder now, Susan?”

Facing toward her, away from him, Nellie Smithfield rolled her eyes. Men.

Image of Barry, back home in Houston. Barry and the kids, glued to the TV. They’d had a lovely last night together, three weeks ago already, the night before the crew had to go into preflight quarantine. Gone out to dinner as a family. Taken the kids to the movies, then home, home to tuck them in. Barry holding me close, in bed later. Just holding me.

Six weeks before I’m in bed with him again. Image of herself snuggled against Barry’s warm back, listening to him sleep, soft, even breathing, a little rough, not rough enough you could call it a snore.

He’s always so still when he sleeps.

Peaceful.

Peaceful when I come home from a day that’s practically driven me insane. Never a word about how his own day went, good or bad. Just: It’s an office. It was there when I left it. It’ll be there when I go back tomorrow. Regular hours, kids in the daycare, dropped off and picked up, day after day.

He’s never once complained about my irregular hours.

Jameson said, “Oh, there was another thing that came through when you were asleep. Processing confirmed the data from Radar Prospector II. There’s definitely an ice-field under the rimwall separating Peary from Rozhdestvenskii. They’ve moved the landing site down range about twenty klicks.”

“Twenty... That’ll put us over the horizon.” And out of line-of-site with Earth.

Nellie’s eyes were serious, measuring. “This is important. We’re going to have to be very careful.”

Jameson: “Jessup says if we can confirm ready access to the ice, if its composition’s not too... Well, readily usable, if not potable, the President will ask congress for a budget adjunct. They’ll start development on a surface habitat for next year.”

And Nellie said, “Oh, yes. And TOPS has been funded through launch. They’ve committed four Saturns to the mission. One probe and backup for each trajectory...”

“They’re going to have to run Michoud flat-out to get that many birds ready.”

Big grin on Nellie’s face. “You ever think, when you were in college, it’d come to this?”

A slow headshake, head full of memories. “No. I guess I figured Johnson was going to commit us all to full involvement in Vietnam.” But he didn’t. Reelected in ‘64, again in ‘68. I felt bad when the Republicans managed to put that damned actor in the White House, year before last, but...

But, by then, the economic theory of Infrastructure Modeling was beginning to catch people’s eyes. Prosperity curves. Government spending curves. The Interstate System. The Strategic Air Command. Project Apollo. Middle class doesn’t care who runs America so long as their jobs are secure. So long as a factory worker can own a house and a car, have a wife who works or not as she pleases...

More and more men staying home these days too. Barry would have lots of company if I could talk him into it.

President coming into office, yammering about a 600-ship Navy. But Mister President, we don’t
need
a new Navy. Well, what’re we going to spend it on, then? In his first State of the Union address, he called it his “Space-Faring Civilization.”

Out the window, Earth hung against the velvet darkness. Barry down there. Me up here. Working to make our dreams to come true. Odd dream though. Odd dream. Something about angels. Something about the ice under Peary. Oh, well. Too much to do for me to waste time worrying about a dream.

So. Get to work. Make your dream live.

In time, that other dream, that very odd dream about black ice and fire and death, would surely fade away.

o0o

Vision fading, fading then gone, young American astronaut-woman Susan Romano, echo of Subaïda Rahman no more, sailing off into the emergent history of a Twentieth-Century America that never was. Possibly never could be. I have to keep reminding myself, thought Ling Erhshan, that everything is possible. Everything. Somewhere out there in the Multiverse, a transfinite number of Americas continue to evolve.

Someone crying softly, a woman’s voice, Passiphaë Laing sprawled naked on the cold white floor of this nearly empty universe. Astrid Kincaid standing near her, arms folded, aloof. Lord Genda Hiroshige and his Lady Amaterasu some distance away, still holding hands.

Overhead, a fuzzy-edged double helix of warm light continued to circle in on itself, winding up out of nowhere, winding away into nowhere, as if merely the middlemost coils of an infinitely long entity.

This is, I think, how a madman feels. All sense of reality lost. Nothing familiar here. A vista so utterly impossible that it calls nothing to mind. Events engulfing us that have no place in our experience. A lunatic would accept this, or a primitive. Some ancient Mesoamerican shaman, downing his peyotl buttons, shivering away into a dream.

A sudden pang of envy. A sudden hope. Of all the dreamers, all the lost souls, Rahman went to a fate most like the shape of her longed-for dream. Subaïda Rahman, American Technologies Specialist, injected into the America that got away. Will they land at Peary and find the Gate under the ice? With luck, in her reality, the will be no Gate.

A vision of some future Rahman, matured and hardened, the dream-time of the Multiverse long forgotten, dancing across the red deserts of Mars.

He stood under the misty coil of light, looking upward, wondering. Finally: “What now, you who call yourself Metatron?”

Nothing. Blue light seeming to change, grow brittle, more sharply defined, crisp, edges taking shape out of nowhere. As if it were changing from light into steel. He said, “Who are you then? Are you really an instrumentality of God?”

What would it mean to me, to find myself in the presence of a real God, a god of the sort Western religions prescribe? Ironic. The religious Westerners, the Muslims and Christians and Jews, have already gone. Nothing left here but two pagan Asians, a robot become flesh, and this presumably atheistic American Sergeant-Major...

Kincaid beside him now, murmuring: “Yes. We’d like to know.”

Voice hardly audible, but then, if this is the God who sees a sparrow fall, what need to cry out in the wilderness? Every need, perhaps. Every need within me, for I am besotted by all the unspoken assumptions that soaked the prose in all those old books.

A little Christian God hiding in every fantasist’s all-powerful alien foe. He said, “We don’t
believe
in you, Metatron. Don’t believe you’re an angel, or even a demon.”

The shadowy outline of a face started to form, outlined in pale white light, superimposed over the now mirror-bright surface of the helix. Not a human face. Alien. A face with something insectile about it, the irrepressible in Ling Erhshan briefly wondering if it would address him as Quatermass...

No
, it said, a whisper in their minds.
If the myths had power to fix you in place, you’d already be gone
.
My task is merely to pass you on up the line
.

Up the line to whom? Who stands above the chiefest angel in the hierarchies of Heaven? Pass us up the line to God Himself? Images from books: God as an old, old man. Distorted, though, long white Caucasian beard replaced by a long, thin, hardly-grayed Chinese beard, the beard of a Confucian sage.

Kincaid said, “Who are you?” Something odd in her voice. As if she already knew.

It said,
Something of Ethqûzæ in me
.

Disbelief mingled with disappointment in Kincaid’s voice. “
Ethqûzæ
? The Scavenger scientist who argued for the abandonment of the Gates? The one who argued for a resumption of single-universe interstellar colonization?”

I knew the Space-Time Juggernaut would come one day. I wanted to save my people. But the temptation was too great, the Multiverse too... appealing. Now I find myself incorporated in the machinery that brought us down
.

Sorrow in the voice, somehow. Ling thought, Something here that transcends culture, increasing the likelihood that this is all a fabrication, an artifact of the madness that may have overwhelmed me some time in the past. Will I become sane again if I hold fast to this feeling that I’ve gone mad? He said, “So you are, then, a manifestation of this fabulous Space-Time Juggernaut?”

Something only a little like laughter.
No. Nor even an individual Scavenger. Ethqûzæ is merely the sense of who I am
. Shiny chrome rolling above them now, mist cleared from its depths, showing only an empty heart.
Your fearsome Jug, your god-elemental, is no more than an agent of the scrap manager, come to collect the pieces that have come loose, tuck in the tag ends of broken skeins, to unravel threads whose fates have become knotted and twisted in upon themselves
.

Ling Erhshan thought,
scrap manager
? and said, “What about us?”

The world around them hardening up now, white sky receding, white plain at their feet stretching out to infinity.
Seraph Metatron, Serpent Fire of Love Everlasting, Infinite, One With All... angel to resource manager to task
...

To Ling Erhshan, it seemed as though a deep brass gong sounded. Not a bell, no. Bells belong to the West. And the White World struck from their eyes...

o0o

Slow sparkle-dissolve to a new world, Astrid Kincaid, sitting at the edge of the void, under a matte-black sky, looking down at the universe, hand on her belly, rubbing slowly, back and forth, smooth, youthful muscle, the flesh of the woman she’d been in the long ago and far away. Young woman, long forgotten.

I just keep expecting him to jump out suddenly, laughing, shouting,
Boo! Gotcha!
Maybe that’s why I feel like this now. I was ready for him. Ready in all the old and pointless ways. They’d been on the Dish for what seemed like days already, time crawling by, punctuated by fruitless discussions. Maybe this and maybe that. We’re just not equipped to understand what has happened. The world around them was a flat white saucer, concave, padded, soft, adrift in what seemed like black nothingness at first. No more silver helix, the five of us abandoned here, naked and alone. And when they ventured to the edge...

Long, long vistas of things like shining picture postcards, arrayed in stacks, stacks arrayed in layers, layers arrayed in legions, just going on and on. She sat looking down at it, ignoring an insistent crawling at the root of her belly. Ready for him, all right. Maybe I’m as mad as Ling insists he must be. Maybe we all are.

Passiphaë Laing disconsolate. Unable to adjust. Genda and Amaterasu silent. Huddled together. Because they have each other perhaps. Ling on the far rim, staring downward into a stack-spangled eternity. Waiting. That’s all we’re doing. Waiting for the managers to come and settle our affairs for us.

At least it makes some sense that way, all this bullshit about angels and God in Heaven swept aside, replaced by the Scavengers’ familiar Toolbox metaphor. Angel of Death displaced by the Space-Time Juggernaut, fearsome Juggernaut displaced by the friendly old scrap manager, come to tuck in all our loose ends. But my friends are still gone, displaced by no more than memories of dry bones.

Is the World Without End really gone too? Or is it merely down in the Stack somewhere, last in, first out, safe and sound, all its souls alive and free to wander? Why would God lie to us? Motive, method, opportunity. Would the resource manager lie to us as well?

Maybe this whole apparition around us, this little world, floating above the great universe beyond, this simple metaphor for the Multiverse we tried to believe in, is a lie as well.

Where could we go from here? Down the rabbit hole? Down through the long wormholes that lead out of the Multiverse, down to the eternal bedrock of Platonic Reality? Why bother? Just one more fanciful lie, evading the question of first causes, refusing to answer the empty question of
why
.