The Transmigration of Souls (49 page)

A rustling beside her, shadow on the padding, cast by the diffuse light of eternity. She looked up and Passiphaë Laing was looking down at her, eyes darkened by shadow. She really is beautiful. When my hormones were adjusted just so, I’d’ve been drawn to her like iron to a magnet. Poor Passiphaë Laing, image of woman rather than woman itself, cast adrift in an unscripted sea.

Laing kneeled beside her, put out a long-fingered hand, hand with perfect, clear nails resting on her thigh, stroking softly, bringing out the latent tingle of her flesh.

A curious image. As if our nerves merely waited for stimulation, all their feelings, all our feelings, built right in, canned programs ready to run. A constant firing and unfiring of virtual sensation, waiting for some eka-event to evoke it.

Crawling in her groin strengthened as well. Because I’m young again? All the tiresome, disappointing years of experience erased? That would be the nature of true immortality, wouldn’t it? No. More like the nature of dying young. Laing’s hand was on her vulva now, knowing fingers probing gently, tucking wisps of soft hair aside, finding self-aware tissue, molding it to her will, the will of her own presumed desire.

Kincaid reached out and took the hand, pulled it away, locked in a strong grasp. “Why do you think this is the answer?”

Laing’s dark, empty-seeming eyes looking into hers. “Because it’s always the answer. The answer in every script. In every imagination. They can take you all away. They can make me be alone forever. But they can’t take away the answer.”

Is this pity I feel? Pity for a one-side creation? She said, “In
Crimson Desert
you were a thing, Passiphaë Laing. Here you’re a person. For people, there’s more than one answer. Always more than one.”

A sorrowing smile. “You think you understand me, don’t you, Sergeant-Major Kincaid? I can see it in your face. Here she stands, you tell yourself, that simplistic creation made to pacify the man-things of an imaginary world, and so pacify the man-things of the world above that.”

The image in her mind read out correctly: Passiphaë Laing in her place on her back, legs spread, soft heart exposed like a meal on a table, the Creator’s hollow-souled man-things masturbating on high.

Laing said, “A creation is part of the thing it was created for. We have that within us, worth ever so much more than your wretched little personhood: the doing of that for which we were made. Made by our gods, however petty they may have been.”

First, the image of art and perception, the thing itself merely existing in the eye of its beholder. Then another image. Robot Amaterasu rump-high over the birthday cake, raped for the delight of laughing men. Is this what you made me for Mother? Is this the life for which your loving hands shaped me?

A quick glance away, down into the white-padded center of the Dish, Genda and Amaterasu, facing each other, hands touching, looking into each others’s eyes, talking. Kincaid said, “But you’re not a thing any more. You’re real, a person whether you want to be or not.”

“Am I?” Soft smile. “And I suppose you imagine yourself to be
real
as well?” She stood then, still smiling, abruptly turned and walked away. Walked away to where Ling Erhshan was staring down into the outer darkness, down on the layered-stack metaphor of worlds without end, of times without number.

Astrid Kincaid sat still, crawling inside her unabated. If I am a thing, she wondered, for what purpose
was
I made? Not hers. Please, God, not hers...

o0o

Ling Erhshan lay on his back, bedded down in the feather-soft padding of the Dish, sated, comfortable, looking up at the empty black sky. I wonder why there’s nothing above us? We sit up here atop all of Creation, like the star atop a Christmas tree.

Odd image. I wonder how that custom spread to China? Probably via Japan in the mid-Twenty-First Century. Shadowy childhood memories of decorating the tree, of opening presents of Christmas morning. Ceremony without meaning. Just as it had been in the America from which it sprang. Not the Feast of St. Jesus. Not glittery Saturnalia. Not the dark time of Yule, log roaring in the fireplace, warming up the Sun, persuading it to return and light up the world with Spring.

Passiphaë Laing sitting beside him, naked on the edge of the Dish, looking down into the stacks, face very still, almost flaccid. Uneasy feeling. What if she jumps off? Two conflicting chains of thought/emotion. One struck through and through with guilt. She came to you for comfort and you met her with... A glance down at a glisten of drying moisture on his abdomen and thighs. Second chain permeated with the urge to pull her away from the edge, push her on her back in the white-fluff padding of the Dish, have at her again.

Which one is the real you, Ling Erhshan? I know the answer, of course. But I don’t want to know...

We’ve become so passive now, waiting for them to come and finish us off. Passive? He felt himself chuckle softly, stomach muscles barely clenching, vocal cords flexing without sound. The
dead
are always passive, lying in their graves, waiting for eternity to roll on by.

Westerners think they’re waiting for Judgment Day, but
we
know the truth. Death is real. Death is forever. Death is... emptiness. Emptiness without end. And yet... here I am. For all my convictions about oblivion, here I am. My life would have been different, had I only known. But known what?

What do you know now, Ling Erhshan, that you didn’t know then? That death is
not
oblivion? What if you have to spend eternity right here, making love to a sorrowing automaton, over and over again, forever and ever?

Is that oblivion as well?

A shake of the head. A sigh. No answer.

Commotion across the way. Kincaid on her feet. Genda and Amaterasu crouching together, looking upward. A silver double-helix, suffused with white light, slid into being above them.

Staring at it, waiting patiently, Ling entertained one more stray thought, a loose end that refused to be tucked in: She sat over there, watching us. How must that have looked to Astrid Kincaid? How must she have felt?

But the time for aimless wondering was over, and now Kincaid put her hands on her hips, magnificent tableau of fearless being, no more than cast in the shape of a woman, and shouted up at the thing, shouted for it to disclose its identity.

You know what she’s expecting.

It said,
List manager
.

Ah, yes, literature of angelic imagery springing up, unbidden. The list manager would be O. Henry’s famous Robin Hood of the Old Heaven, the angel whose duty it was to keep the list of names, the list of people who loved God the best. Fine image, spoiled then by the giggly remembrance of that funny old essay, the one in which Abou ben Ahdem topped the list simply because it had been subjected to a bubble sort.

Passiphaë Laing suddenly screamed, recoiled, perilously close to the edge, Ling reaching out for her as she screamed, “
No
!” Cowering against him then, cupping one hand over his wet genitals, as if protecting him, her own left exposed. “No, you can’t make me leave...”

Leave?

Laing looking up into his face, eyes wild, pleading, begging him to... But what can
I
do? The look of her tearing at him. Helpless. I’m as helpless as you are.

Betrayal.

We always betray them in the end.

The softest voice said,
I’m sorry
.

Letting go of him then, hands clawed, rage in her eyes along with the fear, screaming her refusal, running across the middle of the Dish, stumbling over wrinkles in the fabric of its padding, falling headlong at Kincaid’s feet, woman kneeling to put her hand on Laing’s shaking shoulder. Ling thought, Hand on a shoulder shiny with sweat, her sweat and mine, commingled.

Kincaid was looking upward, too far away for him to see any angry glint that might suffuse her eyes. Looked upward. Silent. And what is there for her to say? Is this necessary? For all she knows, for all we know, it is.

The voice whispered,
Subroutine Laing
.

A stack element suddenly slid into being, seeming to issue from an invisible slit in the nothingness around them, looking like a garish painting, like a cartoon cel perhaps... or a window into... elsewhere.

Long, long vista into a sunset sky, terrestrial sunset of layered red and salmon watercolor washes, just a hunt of blue near zenith, sun bloated and red on the edge of the world, sunlight a glittery path reaching out of the picture, yellow brick road reaching toward them all, inviting, a shimmer of light on a red-tinted sea.

Beach scene, Sand. Surf. Crags in the distance. The sod-crowned edge of the cliff. A dilapidated white beachhouse in the background. And a man, man sitting in the foreground, waiting. Looking out at them with silent eyes.

Come, Subroutine. Time to go
.

A soft moan from Passiphaë Laing.

Then she was, somehow, standing on the edge of the abyss, looking into the stack image. Looking into her world.

Go
.

One last, appalled look around, at Kincaid, at still-damp Ling Erhshan, who felt a gentle urge to tell her goodbye, one hand lifted in a small wave of farewell. She stepped forward, out over eternity...

Reappeared in the cel, motionless, still naked, a lovely shape against the sunset sky, looking back over her shoulder, regret easily read in her features. Ling thought, What is that thing in her hand? A sheaf of white paper, riffled open, words upon them, frozen in the act of being wind-blown.

Her script, perhaps.

The cel slid downward, disappeared into nothingness, carrying Passiphaë Laing with it, down into the folds of her new story, then the list manager, without a sound, without a parting word, corkscrewed upward into the fabric of Creation and was gone.

o0o

Astrid Kincaid stood staring up at the empty black sky for another minute, letting the wholeness of it sink in. Taking us away, one by one, sticking us where we belong. Setting things to rights. Is that how it will end. Some almighty manager taking me in his omnipotent hand, sticking me in my place, leaving me there to... just go on?

A heat of anger staining her cheeks with warmth. I’ll be angry if that’s how it ends.

She looked down again, back into the soft whiteness of the Dish. Amaterasu and Genda standing together, like a set of matched humanoid bookends, arms around each other. Waiting. Waiting for what? ‘Til it’s time to do it again?

Or are they wondering where
they
will go? Together or separate? I imagine it looms large in their minds, being from different settings as they are. I bet they wish they’d stayed in High America with Inbar and Aarae, or even gone down the River with Bruce and Tarantellula-become-Penny, with Ahmad Zeq and Colonel Sir Qamal ibn Aziz Alireza. Even if the World Without End is utterly vanished now, at least they would be nonexistent together.

And Professor Ling Erhshan, looking at nothing, lost in his thoughts, one hand idly massaging his genitals, as if wiping them dry. They probably itch a bit just now.

She walked over to him, walked over slowly, stood in front of him, waiting for him to notice her presence. He did so with a start.

“So. Was she a good fuck?”

Pain brushing across his eyes, there for just a moment, then going away. A tiny shrug, a hint of a smile. Remembering her already? He said, “Yes. Yes she was. One of the best I ever had.”

That ever-ready anger, warming her again. I’ll just bet, you selfish little son of a bitch. Then startled at the turn of phrase, making her turn inward. Do I really believe it’s bad mothering that makes the badness of men? Bad mothering, then, that makes us hate each other, even hate ourselves?

Or did they just tell me that, tell me over and over, when I was too young to understand, until it became an unconsidered part of my inner belief system?

Ling said, “I wonder where she went.”

Sunset over the fat, flat ocean... “Looked like California to me.”

Wistful: “I always wanted to visit California.”

She sat down, folded her arms over her knees, looking back toward the center of the Dish, sat watching Amaterasu and Genda, watching them talk to each other, face to face, eyes on eyes, focused, the rest of the world shut out. After a while, Ling sat down beside her, close enough she could smell his sweat, smell the flat scent of Passiphaë Laing lingering upon him.

He said, “It would be a shame if God split them up.”

A glance in his direction, a look at a somber, thoughtful face, seen in full profile. A flat face. Chinese looking. She said, “You really believe this is all the work of... some real God?”

A shrug. “No. But it’s the only word I have. A handy word, at least.”

The sort of thing you’d expect from a man whose spent his whole life... reflecting on things. She looked back at Amaterasu and Genda. Legs tucked under them, not quite kneeling, bodies angled toward one another. They have little smiles that come and go as they talk. She reaches out from time to time and touches him. He leans forward once, quickly, nuzzles at her cheek.

How much of that is my programming, carried forward through her transition, from circuitboard woman to woman of meat and bone? I wish I could see inside her head. She said, “Do you really suppose they love each other?”

Ling’s voice held an element of surprise. Surprised at the question, coming from me? Or merely surprised at the content of the answer it evokes? He said, “I don’t know.”

“But what do you think?”

A little shrug, hardly there at all. “No way to judge. I don’t know anything at all about love.”

“Why not?”

He was looking at her now, eyes full of... reluctance? He said, “I was always busy with... other things.”

Always busy with other things. The story of my life as well, except for...

Ling said, “Do you know? I think maybe you have been in love, maybe once upon a time.”

That time in which all children’s fables are set. Now it was her turn to shrug, knowing she wanted to be evasive. Not hiding it from him. I’ve been around too long to care what anybody thinks of me anymore. No, just wanting to hide it from myself. “I thought I was. Once upon a time. But memories have a life of their own. Things change.”