The Transmigration of Souls (5 page)

Wonderful, impossible story about a middle-aged soldier, called up against his will to fight in one of his country’s wretched foreign adventures, author’s anger reminding me how foul the world had seemed to its denizens at the turn of the millennium. They should have known how very much worse it would get. Yet they did nothing.

Story about a soldier standing on a mountaintop, defeated, watching as a cruise missile came in over the sea, smashed into the base of the cliff on which he stood. Nuclear explosion. Unadorned flash of white light. Soldier awakening in his tattered uniform on a dusty plain covered with pale yellow moss under a dark lavender sky in which hung the lost blue Earth.
Moon Man
.

Ling Erhshan lying on the fire escape, looking up at the yellow circle of the Moon over Shanghai, imagining himself to be soldier Dorian Haldane, beloved of the beautiful Goth slave-woman Valetta, blown away to another dimension, rather than merely to the timeless eternity of death. Imagining himself lost on the Moon of the Greek-speaking Kalksis oppressors, descended from Ptolemaic colonists stranded after a nuclear war between Rome and Carthage. A Moon inhabited by Chinese-speaking red Indians, by Gothic slaves and Roman guerrillas determined to win free of Greek dominion...

I would lie there in the stinking darkness. Lie there and imagine myself captaining some creaky pentekonter, imagine myself the pirate scourge of the Five Seas I could see, so shadowy, in the yellow world overhead...

The radio speaker set in the main instrument panel suddenly blatted static, then, “
Ming Tian
, do you read?” Chen Li’s voice.

Da Chai leaned close to the audio pickup, and said, “We read you poorly, Control.”

Chen Li said, “We’re having some trouble with your telemetry channel.”

Equipment failure. A cold hand on Ling Erhshan’s heart. Because nothing had really been ready on time, or fully tested.

“What sort of trouble?”

“Interruptions. A second of no signal, then a second of signal. Very regular. Inexplicable.”

Inexplicable
. Ling said, “What’s in the interrupted signal? Static?”

“Hello, Professor. No. More like a carrier-wave hum. Nothing our equipment could produce, I don’t think...”

Ling stared at the worried look on Chang’s face for a moment. “Maybe. If one of those old transistors is...”

The radio speaker, completely free of static, said, “This is Major-General Morris K. Athelstan, speaking for the Department of Defense, United States of America. All spacecraft now flying in Cislunar Space are warned that the Earth’s natural satellite Luna has been claimed as national territory by the United States. Unauthorized landings on United States territory anywhere in the solar system will be treated as a military invasion and dealt with accordingly. This warning will be repeated in one hour, broadcast to all communication systems throughout the world and Cislunar Space. Major-General Morris K. Athelstan, speaking for the Department of Defense, United States of America, signing off.”

The speaker said, “opy you,
Ming T
. Do yead?”

Da Chai turned away from the speaker, mouth hanging open. No words.

 The speaker said, “Come in,
Ming Tian
. Do you read? Over.” Static fading, fading, becoming no more than a background hiss, the familiar music of the spheres.

Ling leaned forward toward the pickup, and said, “We hear you, Chen. Um. Did you... um. Did you pick up the transmission from, um, General...” hard to pronounce, even when you spoke English well, “Athelstan?”

Open microphone from the ground, people shouting in the background, jangly Chinese excitement, then Chen Li: “Yes.”

Chang Wushi said, “What do you suppose it meant?”

Quite possibly, just what it said, but...

No American presence in space for the better part of a century, and...

A piece of that message suddenly jumping back out of memory “... unauthorized landings on United States territory anywhere in the solar system...”

Anywhere in the solar system
?

Da Chai said, “A decision will have to be made on how we proceed.”

Chang Wushi: “Or if we proceed.”

Ling Erhshan gestured out the window with a wan smile at the bright yellow Moon looming huge before them. “We proceed in that direction. Captain  Newton won’t be letting us turn back just yet.”

Da Chai looked over at the beamer’s control console, and said, “Well. We are, at any rate, well armed.”

Another cold hand clutching at Ling Erhshan’s heart.

o0o

Now, by the splendid shores of the endless blue Pacific, that near-mythical California ocean, Astrid Kincaid and her soldiers got ready to go. Pale blue sky, dark blue sea. Extraordinary. And yet... yet I remember so many more extraordinary scenes. Skies and seas without number. Worlds beyond imagining.

Why the Hell did I come home?

Because they ordered me?

Yes. That
was
the reason. Do this, soldier. Do it now. That’s an order.

All right.

Now this.

This is an order too.

Line of men and women, filing toward the ship. Following orders. Getting ready. Ready to go.

Corky Bokaitis, Kincaid decided, looks just like a gorilla. A little girl gorilla. Well. Maybe not quite. But the jutting jaw, the dense, reddish-black hair on her arms, the beetling brows...

PFC Bokaitis was one of three Neanderthalers in the squad, the other two males, none of them taller than five feet three, each of them stronger than any three “normal” humans. I wonder if there are any normal humans left, these days? Sure there are. Billions of them.
Outside
.

Sometimes, I can’t even remember a time when human beings in America were as alike as so many little frogs. Sure, a white one here, a black one there. A yellow one. Every now and again a red one. And picture books showing off the rare breeds. Tall, slim, naked-bodied Nilotics. Khoi-San people with yellow-brown skin and peppercorn hair. Melanesians, Australoids. Hairy Ainu.

What was it, three, four, five years after Closure, when people began toying with the new possibilities? Hey, me, I
can
look like a muscle-bound superhero. Look like the most beautiful woman who ever lived. And all without the torture of dieting, without spending a single moment sweating in the gym.

Then... why, I
can
be tall. I
can
be white. Or black, or yellow, or red, or... Damnation. It isn’t easy being Green. But it’s
possible
, you see. Purple. Blue. Rainbow hued and covered with glitter and... She remembered going to that nature-park play, what? Twenty years back? Maybe more, maybe less. “Breakfast in the Holocene Dawn,” it’d been called. Five muscular runts chasing that damned aurochs retroclone through the woods, jumping on the bastard’s back, knocking him down, animal lowing pitifully, burly blond trolls jabbering as they struggled to break his neck.

After every performance one or the other of the players would be limping from some fracture or another, arm or leg twisted, rib or two buckled. Once, the aurochs, furious about being killed over and over again, had gotten one of the actors down, running one long, red-dripping horn through and through his guts, actor wriggling and squalling in a thick, old-fashioned, very artificial-sounding Yankee accent: “Ow! Ow! Get ‘im aaaff me! Ow!”

That day, the audience had roared.

And, just so everything would be “right,” they’d let the actor lay there blubbering until he died, before hooking him up to a MedDep terminal. Post-resurrection, we gave them both a standing ovation, man and aurochs alike. Blond. Neanderthalers were mostly blond, PFC Bokaitis rather inauthentic in that respect.
It’s just that black hair looks so
...
mean
.

Zappa’s Law: “Give a guy a big nose and funny-looking hair...”

Jesus. What a fucking waste of time.

Rest of the squad wasn’t much better, little gargoyles, big gargoyles, men and women constructed to look like heroes and, um... heroines, one supposed, from old, old movies. And post-Immortal, every one. every one of them born since the Event, and not one of these babies has ever thought he or she might have to die...

Remember what that felt like? Remember when you were seventeen, and everyone said, Teenagers think they’re immortal? Who the Hell dreamed up that lie? Remember being seventeen, lying in bed at night, thinking about the sick, sorry inevitability of death? Thinking about it. In twenty years, you’d say, I’ll be middle aged. Twenty more years and I’ll be old. Twenty years after that, ancient. Twenty years after that, no matter how careful, no matter how lucky, I’ll be dead.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

What kind of sorry damn God would rig a game with rules like that?

Fuck you, God.

I’m off to see the Wizard.

Who, it turned out, had immortality for us, after all.

Now, watching her sixteen little playtoy soldiers march back and forth, loading supplies and gear into the hull of the Scavenger rocketship, Kincaid wondered just how they’d face it, when and if, if ever. Hell. Nothing’s going to go wrong. Nobody’s going to get killed. Fly to the Moon in a fucking invincible alien spacecraft, arrest some fucking Arabs and Chinamen. Make sure the Base is still locked up tight. Come home.

Right.

And make sure the fucking Gate is still shut, its address tables thoroughly scrambled.

Make sure they can’t find us
...

Whoever they are.

Brief, sharply repressed memory of fire, fear, and blood.

We just didn’t understand the Scavenger records at first. Space-Time Juggernaut? What the Hell is that? Didn’t understand that the Scavengers had combed through all those incomprehensible Colonial records. Combed through them for years and decades and centuries, until they thought, just maybe, they understood... that it might be coming for them.

It didn’t occur to us to wonder why they were gone.

Until it came for us.

Remember how we waited? Days and weeks and months and... no Space-Time Juggernaut. No end of the world. Whew. Got away with it. Generals and politicians relieved. Made it. Safe. Home free. Home.

But I didn’t destroy the gate. It’s still up there. Waiting.

I used to imagine just a few more weeks would go by. A few weeks, a month, two or three, no more than a year,
surely
... and the radios would crackle, crackle on down from the Moon. Dale Millikan here. Sorry I’m late. Could you folks send up a ship?

A year, Two. Three. Five. Ten. Twenty. Forty. Sixty...

PeeWee Roth, a noseless, toothy gargoyle just a little more than eight feet tall, came and towered over her, saluting. “All loaded up, m’am.” It was amazing he could talk around those fangs at all, much less sound like some old borscht-circuit comedian, making tired jokes about gefillte fish.

“I don’t suppose it’d do any good to remind you I’m just a noncom...” She looked for some readable expression in those glassy weimaraner eyes. “No, guess not.”

The communicator on her belt chirped and she pulled it off, holding it in the palm of her hand, remembering a favorite TV show from her childhood. Why the Hell are we using eighty-year-old junk like this?
Answer
: Because no one bothered to make new ones. Didn’t think of it. Didn’t think we’d need them. She flipped it open and said, “Kincaid.”

“Sergeant, this is General Athelstan.”

“Sir.” No urge to salute. This bastard had been a little shitass second  louie back in the old days, had been with her on the Moon, sure, but never once stuck his nose through the Gate. Now look at him.

“The Arabs have initiated their descent sequence, Sergeant. You are go for launch. Plan Bravo.”

Plan Bravo
, for Christ’s sake. Like they had a full array of tactical paths ready to whip out at a moment’s notice. Like they’d actually
planned
for this.

“Acknowledged.” She flipped the communicator shut and stuck it back on her belt, turned to the toy soldiers of her new squad. Bright-eyed, every one, looking at her like, what? Mommy? No, more like Playground Leader. “OK, boys and girls,” she said, “Boots and saddles...” And, for just one moment, felt a tiny atavistic thrill.
Boots and saddles
. We’re going up and out.

o0o

Strapped in his seat in
al-Qamar
’s control room, surrounded by his comrades, hands on joystick and throttle, Alireza waited for final burn initiation. Waited for Zeq to say
sif
and hit the switch.
Not
watching the mission clock. No, just waiting, staring up at the black sky, nothing, not the sun, not the Earth, not the Moon visible. Nothing but dead black velvet sky.

That crazy warning coming in over the com channel. Consternation in mission control. American observers questioned. No. Sorry. Don’t know a thing about it, fellows. No one’s said a word to us...

So what do we do
now
?

Say your prayers. Make the phasing burn. Go down the pike. Land.

What else
is
there to do? Go home? Cancel the program? We can’t
do
it without the Moon. Land somewhere else,
other
than the old American base? But we made that an integral part of our plans, part of bootstrapping to the Mars colony. Mars colony, you see, so when the Collapse comes, in thirty years, or fifty, or seventy, all of humanity’s precious eggs won’t be in the same damned basket. Besides, Mars just seems so damned... Arab. Red deserts and all that.

Then Zeq counted backwards to
sif
and hit his switch, watching his panels, muttering engineering data. Somewhere down in the bowels of the rocket, pressure-fed ullage engines growled softly, fuel and oxidizer surging down into pumps, pumps which whined, pressure building, fuel and oxidizer mixing, hypergolic igniters jetting briefly, liquid fluorine spraying into an expanding mist of hydrogen...

The control panel vibrated gently under his hands as the big aerospike engine caught. Somewhere down below, really below now as deceleration built, dropping him butt-down into the seat, fiery gases were expanding into the void.