The Transmigration of Souls (8 page)

Shit.
Just like in the old TV shows
... She put the communicator on her belt and kept looking out the window, watching the Moon grow, wishing it was that bright blue moon she’d seen once, long ago, in a galaxy so damned far away they never
did
figure out just which one it was.

o0o

Consternation.

Arabs gabbling to each other, big eyes even wider, like white European eyes now, probably saying, “Did you hear
that
...” fat-faced scientist waving his arms, teetering off balance in the low gee, commander reaching out to steady him, muttering low.

And confusion in me, as well, thought Ling Erhshan. Two voices in my ears. One a woman, snarling nearly-incomprehensible Arabic, a language I only studied for two years as an undergraduate, thirty years ago now. And another woman, hard, barbaric voice speaking Chinese, echoing back through the circuit from
Ming Tian
.

Recognizably the same woman’s voice. Metallic, angular and deadly. Well. Not such a difficult trick. The UN computer in Singapore does just as well.

Da Chai, speaking in his left ear now: “Ling...”

“I heard.”

“Maybe you’d better come back to the ship.”

“I... think not.”

“If there’s fighting...”

Image of technogenic lightning bolts. “It would appear that it’s a manned ship we face, not a missile. I assume you will... hold your fire?”

Soft static in the earphone, Arabs still snarling to each other, then Chang Wushi said, “The particle beam weapon will not be much use against infantry, once they’ve debarked. Other than that, all we have are our sidearms.”

Ling was trying to keep consciousness his own little gun, with its pathetic little bullets, tucked away in the suit’s right knee pouch, suppressed. “Still. I think there’s no other choice.”

“We’ll do whatever seems appropriate, when the time comes.”

That cold hand again.

o0o

Alireza kept listening to Inbar, hearing his insistent, frightened plea, “Let’s just go back and get in the ship. Let’s
wait
. What harm can it do?” But the decision was already made, his arguments fading away. “Mahal?”

“Here. What do you make of it?”

Nothing. I make nothing of it. He felt a momentary urge to tell them to get out of the ship and come over to the dome,
stay together
, but, “Sit tight. Um. Maybe you’d better do a preflight.”

Tariq: “We’d already started that. Even before...”

Right. Memory of a ridiculous woman’s voice, grating in his ears. Old fashioned Arabic, full of heavy consonants and sharp sounds. Guttural stops where glottals should be. Like the Arabic of my country cousins in Hejaz, rather than the crisp, modern sounds of
bälädi
, Dialect of the Cities, the Arabic you heard on the nets, were taught to use in school...

And Zeq, suddenly popping out of the rabbit hole: “Qamal, Omry, you
have
to come
see
this!...” Stopping suddenly, at the sight of Ling.

Inbar put his hand out, touching the arm of the Chinaman’s suit. “There’s... something here. We don’t know what.”

Alireza felt a quickening surge of... what? Ownership? A desire, at any rate, to prevent this... foreigner, he supposed, from seeing the underground gallery. Silly. Not mine. Not
ours
. In just a little while the Americans will come and take it away from us. Try to, at any rate.

Sigh. “We’ve got about half an hour. Let’s go look.”

o0o

Subaïda Rahman was standing by the rear wall of the underground chamber, perhaps a kilometer from the entrance, with its balcony and stone stairs. Anomaly after anomaly. Now this... thing. Most of it had been merely strange. Inexplicable. Funny looking bushes and trees. Bits of machinery that were like
nothing
she’d ever studied. Not stuff from the Renaissance, certainly. Not much like the few bits and pieces that had escaped from Fortress America over the years.

Memory of being in the top secret government laboratory south of Äwbahri, at the terminus of the Fäzzan rail line, buried in the hardpan desert of Idehan Marzuq. Hot desert wind without, cool airconditioning within, while her colleagues lowered the little silver helmet over her head...

Just found it out there, floating in the sea, though something that felt this heavy and dense to the hand should have sunk like a stone...

Feather light on my head though.

How does it feel?

All right.

Can you see anything?

No.

How about when I do this?

Well...

Pins and needles at the base of her spine, building, building...

The sudden orgasm had made her surge from the chair, ripping the thing off her head, standing almost bowlegged, then almost knock-kneed, crying out...

Male scientists staring at her in puzzled astonishment.

Maryam, the one other woman on the team coming forward suddenly, brushing back her short, stiff hair, looking into her eyes, seeming nonplused.

Did what I think just happen to you?

Shaky whisper, Yes. Yes, I think so...

Maryam picking up the little silver helmet, smirking, We could make a lot of money, if we could learn to manufacture these...

Shaky laughter, ignorant male colleagues gathering round, demanding to know what was going on.

Dr. Saddiq taking the thing from Maryam, saying, Well, maybe we’d better try harder to find an English dictionary with this word in it. Tapping the front of the helmet, where it said,
Orgonogenesis Inc
.

Who wants to be next? Mahmuhd?

Maryam and Subaïda hid their smiles until after the young man went through his version of the experience. Tried not to laugh when a stunned Mahmuhd excused himself to go change his linen. It was a few days before someone figured out the connection to the word
orgone
, which had been in their dictionaries, all along...

This thing on the chamber’s rear wall though... not like that at all. More like an altar to some technological god, some typically American god. Big smooth sheet of what looked like polished black formica, set flush with the rear wall, coated with a thick layer of plastic sealant.

Not quite featureless. If you leaned close, you could see rainbow refraction, an interplay of colors just like the ones you saw on the surface of a 20th century videodisc. Microscopic pits in the formica? Invisibly tiny bubbles, like dust motes in the plastic coating? Or some property of the plastic itself?

There was a heavy frame around the thing, marking out an area perhaps twenty meters square, things like insulated wires, red and blue and black, marked by various colored stripes, coming out here and there.

Ham fisted. Hardly the sophistication you’d expect from the Great Renaissance. We do better work than this, even now. Almost as if it had been built by those old Germans, building for Apollo. Heavy. Redundant. Brooklyn-Bridge engineering they’d called it.

There was a little chair, covered with fine white dust, a small control panel mounted on a console. Dials, meters, gauges, what looked like dead LCD readouts. Brute force toggle switches and big square push-buttons. All of them carefully labeled, in English, with bits of embossed color tape. Very enticing, that caged switch that said, “Power Main.” Flip it on and...

“Relaxen und watch das blinkenlights.”

Funny memory. Despite years of technical journal reading, that poster, seen in an old British laboratory, had been hard to understand, English words transposed into faux German grammar...

This row of twelve rheostat dials now...

Big-T.

Little-t.

X, Y, Z.

X, Y, Z all primed.

Little-i.

Plus and minus.

Chord.

Chord
? Maybe it was a lunar pipe organ...

Then again, why would there be
separate
properties of plusness and minusness?

She reached out, as if to twirl one of the dials, thought better of it, took out her CCDCD camera and took a picture of the whole control panel, then started taking closeups of all the instrument settings.

All right.

Now then.

She hit the power switch and watched the lights light up.

Some of them did indeed start to blink.

o0o

Four of them, the Arab astronauts and a stray Chinese scientist, walking down the garden path together. Almost huddling against one another, surrounded by strangeness. Omry Inbar, stopping suddenly by a pile of old rocks. Kneeling, picking one up, muttering something in childhood-abandoned Hebrew. Turning the rock over and over again. Picking up the next one. Then another.

“What is it?” asked Zeq.

“These rocks are... weathered.”

Alireza said, “Not much weather in here.” Looking up at the distant gray ceiling, wondering for the thousandth time just where the light was coming from.

Ling knelt beside Inbar, and said, “I’m not a geologist, but... I’ve spent some time in rocky country.” Thinking of the Taklamakan. “These seem... exotic. Not like any mineral specimens I can remember seeing.”

Inbar looked at him, face still and strained. “I don’t recognize them either.” Moving on, going back toward the rear of the chamber, where strange light had begun to play. Rahman was back there somewhere. But she had a lot of sense. A careful woman, a thoroughgoing scientist, who could be trusted to... stay out of trouble.

From Zeq, sharply: “Commander!”

Then, the four of them staring down at a skeleton of clean, dry white bones.

Alireza said, “Not
quite
to the ‘clean bones gone’ stage.” But dusty looking, as if they were about to crumble away.

Inbar said, “The ligaments are gone. If there was wind and weather they’d be... scattered.” Very quite voice. Very uneasy.

Ling, some distance away, said, “There are more of them over here.”

Them
? Bones massed in a pile. Still discrete individuals, not mixed together or anything, but...

“As if,” said Alireza, “they died huddled together.”

“Holding one another,” said Zeq.”

They went on.

Ling Erhshan standing, staring, at a pretty little shrub, thousands of little yellow flowers, no leaves. Stalks and stems of some odd silvery stuff. Leaning closer... Not flowers, no. No pistils, no stamens. Just fleshy yellow material...

In his very good academic English, Inbar whispered, “What do you suppose it is?”

No supposition. The rest of the plants here were your standard sorts, straight from someone’s idea of an English garden. “Maybe... There were plenty of commercial horticultural geneticists working in America, back in the 2050s...”

“Maybe.”

Then they were standing behind Subaïda Rahman, watching her photograph all the lit-up dials and gauges, watching her record angular Romanic numbers from LCDs and bits of film-CRT.

“Amazing any of this still works,” said Zeq.

Alireza: “What is it?”

“How would we even guess?” whispered Inbar, still speaking English, standing beside Ling.

Rahman turned and looked at them. Plucked a piece of tattered paper from the console. Handed it to Alireza.

“It looks a little like the handwriting on that other note. The one in the airlock. Hard to tell... I’m not used to looking at English script.”

Ling took it from him, read, “Millikan’s team at gate 001010. Setting...” Numbers and non-alphanumeric symbols.

Rahman gestured. “That last stuff matches the settings on these dials. The binary...” Pointing at a row of six mechanical switches, under a pieces of tape that said, “Portal Address.” Switches 3 and 5, reading from the left, as you would in English, were in the down position, the rest flipped up.

Ling felt a mild pulse of astonishment. “As if they were programming a 1950-vintage digital computer.”

A look of measured respect. “That’s a good analogy.”

Mahal’s voice suddenly buzzed in Alireza’s earphones, reedy and attenuated, almost inaudible, though they’d left the doors open and made certain radio waves would propagate down into the chamber. “Commander?”

“Here.”

“The Americans have begun their braking burn. The engine is... very bright...” Through the static you could tell Mahal was quite nervous.

“I’ll be right up. Try to raise them on the international distress frequency.” He turned and looked at the others. Reluctance plain on their faces.
This is magic
, their faces were saying.
Who cares about mere soldiers
?

He said, “Zeq. And you’d better come too, Professor Ling.”

Disappointment, but, “Of course. I’ll try to see that my crewmembers... stay calm.”

o0o

Stepping out of the hatch in the ground, Alireza could see what had Mahal so upset. The dome was flooded with bright white light, light coming from a blinding blue-violet spark in the sky, light so bright its contrast had washed away the crescent Earth, washed away much of the Lunar landscape as well. A fusion drive, perhaps? Or something better? Allah alone knew what magic these people were sitting on. Keeping to themselves. Waiting for the rest of us to fill the Earth and die in our own poison... Waiting us out. And now come to kick us off their Moon, so we can’t even
try
to save ourselves.

Ling said, “I can’t seem to get through. I thought I had them, but now there’s only static...”

Outside, the light suddenly faded, pouring away into the heavens, retracting into a bright knob of flame, flame hovering, licking against itself, high up in the deep black sky.

“My God...” said Inbar.

Ling said, “Like a rocketship in one of those old Japanese
manga
.” Like a rocketship. Like...

Ming Tian
suddenly flashed, once, very hard, very bright, and something like a bolt of lightning flew up from the little ship, straight at the hovering rocket.

Nothing. Motionless.

Ling, in Chinese, to himself: “Oh, Chang Wushi, oh, Da Chai, too many army-made, war-mad days and nights...”

A long tongue of dull red fire reached down from the heavens...