The Transmigration of Souls Read online

  But the toys seldom escaped. Aircraft that approached her shores found themselves unaccountably turning away. Ships that came within a hundred kilometers simply stopped. You could go to Mexico and stand by the Rio Grande, could go stand in the Canadian woods, and marvel at those walls of solid air. Could marvel at fairy castles visible in the distance, like something, yes, very much like something out of some American fantasy movie of the 1930s.

  Could go stand on Vancouver Island and watch the magic planes go back and forth between the mainland and Hawaii, or on up to Alaska. Seventy years. Now this.

  Ming Tian no longer had room for a crew of six, because the government had decided that, in place of three men, in place of her principal scientific instruments, she would carry a collimated particle beam weapon and storage battery of some advanced design, the same sort of weapon Chinese warships carried to knock down incoming missiles.

  What do they think? The Arabs are going to shoot antishipping missiles at us from the Moon? Maybe so. Who knows what governments think? If anything.

  So he sighed and sat down on the edge of his acceleration couch, began going over his own checklists, making his own preparations. Soon it would be time to suit up. Suit up and fly away to the Moon.

  o0o

  Sergeant-Major Astrid Kincaid, late of the Third Division, USMC Lunar Expeditionary Force, slid the middle and ring fingers of her right hand into the gyndroid’s vagina, began palpating the pretty machine’s clitoris with the ball of her thumb, slowly, gently, a small circling motion, clockwise little ohs. Tissues were swelling inside, moistening, ridges of pubococcygeus muscle tightening on cue, gripping her fingers with delicate strength, rippling back upward to a cervical os that she knew would slowly descend.

  Ought to, anyway, if I’ve done this right...

  She rubbed her left hand slowly back and forth across the gyndroid’s abdomen, just above the thing’s patch of sparse black pubic hair, feeling muscles there tighten, looked over at the holodisplay floating above the progtool’s input pad.

  Hmh. Not quite right.

  She reached out and tapped the spinal ganglion feedback loop icon, numeric spinner adjusting appropriately, and listened to the gyndroid’s soft sigh.

  Looked up at its face.

  Pretty, almost-black eyes, classic almond-shaped eyes, slitted with deepening passion, mouth open just a little bit, delicate sheen of sweat on its brow, neutral North-Asian complexion just beginning to flush as its faux hormones surged.

  Hmh. She tapped on the plateau icon, and the gyndroid’s back arched a little, pressing harder against her hand, pelvis cupping forward, straightening its vaginal path so the fingers could go a little deeper.

  And Astrid Kincaid found herself looking into those loving black eyes, eyes she’d painted with such care, watching them sparkle with pleasure, flood with faux happiness, with faux life, with...

  The gyndroid’s head went back, thrashing against the pillow, mouth opening, “Oh...” hips pushing forward, vaginal muscles clenching, massaging as no real woman’s unmodified vagina ever would, cervical os coming down, right to where... She looked over at the display, where Amaterasu’s response graph was compared to a feedback normative derived from Roddie’s MedDep records. Well. If he doesn’t like this for his birthday, the ungrateful little bastard...

  She could feel the gyndroid’s muscles relaxing, gripping her fingers ever so gently. Just the way Roddie would like it. Amaterasu opened her eyes, looking down at Astrid, eyes filled with sleepy, loving softness, and whispered, “Thank you, Mother. It was wonderful.”

  She nodded slowly. Tell it, You’re welcome, Daughter? A small twinge there. Old mammalian conscience speaking. From the days when the Goddess had us care for one another. She slid her fingers out, wiping her hand on the front of her lab smock, still looking into the gyndroid’s haunting eyes.

  I remember. I remember when I was so bored with men. What? Twenty, thirty years ago now. When I had MedDep adjust my hormones so I’d love women more than men. When this thing... But then I grew bored with that. As I grow bored with everything. As Roddie will grow bored with this new toy. A year. Two years. A decade. And another, another...

  And so little brother Roddie, who was an infant when I was a teenager, is 114 years old today. And, in another six weeks, I will be 130... The avalanche of time, opening up a gulf of years between then and now. Between that old, young life, when we all expected to die, and this... immortality.

  She reached out for the progtool’s input pad, and the gyndroid’s hand reached out to touch her arm. “Mother...”

  Astrid looked at it again, at the almost-suffering, faux suffering, in those beautiful black eyes. She waited.

  The gyndroid said, “Will I remember this moment?” Pleading in those eyes.

  A long pause, then Astrid shook her head. “No, Amaterasu. You’ll forget.” Beautiful black eyes filling with a mist of tears. Of sorrow. Faux sorrow.

  Astrid finished her movement, fingers reaching out to tap, just once, on the master-switch icon. The light of life in the gyndroid’s eyes faded, the eyes closed, the lovely, responsive body went still, arm relaxing, resting gently on the edge of the workbench.

  Well, it was a wonderful new toy. And I had a wonderful time building it. Something to interest me, if only for a little while, experience defining the latest fad, the rash of hobbyist kits appearing everywhere, people looking for something new in a world whose offering of experiences grew increasingly sparse.

  She reset the gyndroid’s memory table, punched in the codes that would bond it to Roddie as soon as it awoke and beheld itself in his arms. Amaterasu’s vagina would moisten with anticipation as soon as it saw his face.

  It? She? I wonder how the gyndroid perceives itself?

  She searched through the datasets until the ID matrix came up. He. She shook her head and smiled. They’d probably programmed this off some two-generation-old piece of industrial machinery, from the first flush of development, when the Scavenger records were first made public. She tapped in new code, and Amaterasu became a woman.

  Roddie would like that.

  Astrid powered down the progtool, holodisplay sliding out of existence, disappearing through a slot in thin air, closed the input pad, then stood and went around to the gyndroid’s head. Popped the sensors out of its, no her spun-fiber brain tissue. Closed the skull, slid the pate, with its long, silky black Asian-girl hair into place, let it reattach itself, let the sensors reel back into their progtool sockets.

  Stood looking down at Amaterasu the Gyndroid. Almost in sorrow. Real sorrow? Hard to know. My feelings may be faux feelings by now. What’s left of the woman I was so long ago? Or the girl who came before her? The child who played soldier, who grew up following the American Renaissance. Who excelled in athletics, who toughened her spirit and joined the Marines and went off to the Moon when the... Event happened.

  Long gone, I suspect. Erased by decades of change. Change and sameness. Brief memory of Dale Millikan, lost and gone forever. Brief pulse of regret. Was I ever that innocent? No. Never. She came around to the gyndroid’s side, reached down and dug one finger into its, her navel, push and twist just so, and pulled open the carapace, delicate breasts rising on a hinged chest wall.

  Hardly anything real in there, all the parts necessary for pure robotic function so terribly miniaturized, beyond anything we could ever have imagined when I was young. Monofilament muscles. Stepper motors the size of a housefly that could lift a house from its foundation. A fusion powerplant fueled by atmospheric condensation.

  Without her human parts, her woman parts, Amaterasu would be an empty shell. These bellows just faux lungs, so she could pretend to breath. So she can blow out the candles on her birthday cake... A nice, compact faux digestive system so she could eat and drink, confront her lover with the excitement of faux elimination, on demand. Big canisters of concentrated chemicals down where the intestines ought to be. So she can manufacture lubricants and sweats, filled with pheromones t
o excite Roddie’s senses, enhance his every pleasure...

  She snapped the hull shut and, once again, Amaterasu was a sleeping girl.

  o0o

  The shower room, brightly lit, was all shiny chrome, white porcelain, black tiles, Astrid Kincaid getting undressed, not quite oblivious to its stark, utilitarian symmetry. Its beauty. Yes. I’d call it that. Standing in the middle of the floor, dropping her clothes in an untidy pile while the shower hissed behind its frosted glass door, stray bits of steam starting to roll up by the ceiling.

  The image in the mirror.

  A tan, Caucasian woman, mature woman of indeterminate age. Not young, you understand. But not old. Tall. Robust. Limbs lined with smooth muscle. Belly flat above neatly outlined pelvic bones, padded enough to hide the hardness there. Breasts large enough to be... womanly? Hair of spun gold, shining like metal in the sun. Eyes of molten silver.

  Is that my face? I can’t remember.

  A pretty face, yes. But strong. A soldier’s face, perhaps.

  Suddenly conscious, just then, of the faint tang of her own sweat. Hardly there at all, but reminding you of other sweaty days, sweaty days and nights that seemed to go on and on, ‘til you thought you’d have to die to escape. She got into the shower, turning her back to the spray, feeling the water sluice down over her skin, rushing over her shoulders, little waterfalls forming, water streaming off the ends of her nipples.

  Bar of soap, soft in her hand, pale violet soap with a smell of lilacs, wet soap going round and round between her hands, soap foaming up white, slick foam rubbed on her skin. Rubbed in her armpits, around the base of her neck, where sweat would accumulate. Soft, slick soap foam rubbed on her belly and down between her legs, wet hair matting suddenly, golden hair like metal wire growing spiky and strange.

  Dull thought: Playing with the robot should have excited me. Didn’t. Hands motionless down between her legs, fingers... not even tempted?

  No.

  I haven’t felt like it in a long damned time.

  Tired. I’m tired.

  Tired for years. Maybe even decades.

  A soft sigh, hands resuming their washing, then turning round and round under the showerhead, clean water carrying away the foam, not carrying away the sense of... exhaustion? No. Impossible for me to be tired. Little symbiotes in your blood, inside your cells, symbiotes substituted for organelles.

  Tipping her head back under the shower now, letting the water run through her hair, down over he face, closing her eyes, feeling it run over her lips. Not lost. Nobody’s ever lost anymore.

  Image of a face. Of many faces. Lost.

  Faces falling down through the all the unending universes, down to the bedrock of Platonic Reality and beyond. Bitter smile. We understand so much now. And so little.

  Hard pang of despair. Oh, God damn you, Dale Millikan. Why did you have to go and die on me? Image of his face, aging face, face from the days before immortality engulfed us all. Crisp gray hair. A hint of jowl line. Neutral grayish brown eyes. Eyes full of... full of telling. Of...

  Image of Dale... snap... reduced to a little pile of clean white bones. Is that what happened? Is it? That old, old panic, that old sorrow, welling right up, then... You don’t know. You weren’t there. What if he didn’t die? What if he’s out there, somewhere, wandering, lost, waiting for you?

  That pathetic upwelling of hope.

  Ridiculous hope.

  Dead and gone. You know that. Dead and gone, like all the others. What’s this hard lump in your throat then, Astrid Kincaid?

  o0o

  Then, sitting in the living room, hot mug of black coffee cradled in her hands, settled into her old red favorite chair beside the big, open bay window, window facing the sea. Pale gray ocean out there, sky slowly brightening, soon to be fired by sunrise, sun just below the horizon. In the night, it’d looked like a slow-rolling landscape of molten licorice.

  Dark candy sweeping up onto my beach.

  Out there, somewhere, just a few thousand miles away, lay the shores of Africa. Morocco, we used to call it. Now the coast of the UAR state of Maghreb. Where al-Qamar rests poised on its forbidden launch pad.

  By God, they are really going.

  Too bad.

  Alone in her room then, her room of many years, undisturbed years. Shelf on endless shelf of old things. Ancient things. My father’s books. My mother’s books. Because they died not long before the gods granted us immortality. Momentary pulse of agèd, fading horror. The last generation of Americans who had to die... My own books, from when I was young, from the last dying days of real books, when I was a child.

  Cardreaders from the years after that. From when I was in school, from when I was a young soldier. The little black cube of her library tap, which held all the books in America. Her... artifacts.

  A Scavenger transliterator. Next to it, a modern analysis device, with a neat input pad and polymetric display system. A government-supplied cerebroanalikon engine tying them together. One of the benefits of having been in on it from the beginning. You already knew. Knew everything the government wanted to conceal. They had to let you in on it, or kill you, imprison you, something...

  Waste not, want not, Sergeant, the smiling politician said, after she finished her closed-door Senate testimony in the last days of the Closure Hearings. Set her free, put her on half pay, with access to hardware and a license to do direct research on Colonial artifacts brought back from... well. From the Moon. That was all they ever said.

  And the e-mail message on the library tap holodisplay, message already three days old. Recalled to active duty, Sergeant-Major Astrid Kincaid. And you know why. Yes I do, damn it. Because none of the God-damned officers are willing to go back... out there. But something has to be done, and done now. They should never have let it get this far.

  Americans never change. We always wait until there’s nothing left to do but... act.

  Outside, the sun was rising, making a bright, shimmering path over the no-longer wine-dark sea. Four thousand miles away, in the deserts of Maghreb, it would be mid-morning now.

  o0o

  Not long after the built-in hold for prayers at zuhr, summer sun standing high overhead, waves of heat making the desert shiver like an illusion of itself, Qamal ibn-Aziz Alireza stood in the white room atop al-Qamar’s gantry, letting the technicians help him into his flight suit, a familiar, already time-worn ritual.

  Tall and thin, handsome, regular of feature and dark of skin, with dark brown eyes and coarse, short black hair, a close-cropped chin-strap of a regulation Air Force beard. Picked as commander, perhaps, for the image he’d make on TV.

  Image. That’s me.

  A not-quite-bitter thought.

  Bitter? Why bother? I am going. That’s all that matters.

  This is the historical cusp of all that we’ve worked for, worked already for half a generation. Because we perceived the end of human civilization, the end of history, coming over time’s horizon, we choose now to go to the Moon, then beyond. To save ourselves, and ultimately everyone else. Everyone living outside the invisible walls of Fortress America.

  Historical cusp.

  Strange notion.

  What if we hadn’t decided to go?

  What if the UAR’s politicians had squabbled and argued and fought until it was too late? Imagine, for just a moment, some other history, where the world’s population grew while its resources dwindled. Images of war and famine. Green China reaching out with all its might and all its people to take over what’s left of the Earth.

  Image of some remote day, only not so remote now, image of a time no more than a century or two down the historical road. Image of squalid survivors, battling desperately for the scraps their ancestors left behind, facing an empty future, looking now at their own images of a dead, empty world. Unless...

  Unless the Americans emerge. Emerge with their magical, inexplicable technologies to save us all. Or emerge with brooms of fire to sweep us all away.

  The othe
r members of the crew had already gone ahead. Mahal and Tariq, Rahman, Inbar and Zeq, already aboard, already strapped in their seats, running the engineering checks, getting ready for launch.

  We keep telling ourselves about the future we imagine. Images of the Space-Faring Civilization to come. Images of escape. Escape from the forces of History. But you know, you just know, that somewhere in the councils of government, there are men who harbor darker dreams. What was it the Americans found on the Moon, three generations ago? What was it that sent them flying home, sent them into hiding?

  When we go to the Moon, first, foremost, we look for the sources of the Americans’ magic. Why else target our first landing for the site of their old polar base? Because we know they found ice there? Hardly.

  Grimace of distaste. Like scavengers. After scraps.

  Hard for me to concentrate today, despite decades of military discipline, despite years of piloting discipline. Despite the fact that I’ve been to orbit six times before, though I know the rituals.

  This is different. Today, I’m going to the Moon.

  Hard to imagine...

  Head filled instead with memories of the night before. Of taking his two daughters to bed, tucking them in, kissing them good night. Thinking, I’ll already be gone when they awaken in the morning. They’ll see me on TV. See me fly away into the sky...

  Memories of taking his fretful wife, of taking lovely Amîna to bed. Of making love to her, then comforting her while she cried. Nothing will happen. You’ll see. It’s just one more flight into space. Almost routine. Every part has been tested. But, if something goes wrong, you’ll be so far away...

  He’d smiled and held her and lied to her.

  The technicians finished zipping him in, then, smiling for the cameras, he shook hands all around and they opened the door to the catwalk, escorted him across open space to the ship. Searing desert sun, and yet it was cold out here. Would be cold to men not cocooned in spacesuits. Frosty smoke drifting off the sloping sides of the ship, just the way they had on his other launches. He stopped and looked down. Men still on the concrete below, though the ship was full of liquid oxygen and hydrogen now, checking out the first stage’s great annular engine structure.