The Transmigration of Souls Read online

  Genda’s voice, a whispered hiss: “This doesn’t make any sense at all. Four thousand kilometers from a planetary surface, under one-gee, but a dense atmosphere...”

  Amaterasu looked, said, “In all directions,” kept her hands flying. The brilliant spark ahead of them approached fast, slid to one side, swept on by, going behind them, warping their trajectory, but the view ahead stayed more or less the same, detail on detail, patches of brown and green, silvery patterns like forked lightening, things that looked like broad river systems of white...

  Those are mountain ranges I’m seeing. Seeing from far, far above. Old astronaut films... and my one brief moment of glory, looking down from Ming Tian as it swept around the world toward TLI. Mountains growing fast, pimpling up into 3-D reality.

  Brucie, leaning forward, staring out at an approaching wall of world, said, “Good thing we weren’t moving fast relative to the gate.”

  Ling looked into the control console, found a set of numbers that seemed to represent some kind of relative velocity. Numbers getting smaller as Baka-no-Koto rammed through air. We must look like some vast falling star...

  Kincaid said, “What the Hell is that?” Pointing.

  A tiny, silvery speck in the... sky? Hard to call it that. Sky is empty space that goes on forever, colored sometimes by scattered light. Here, there was ground everywhere you looked. Silvery thing growing larger: Aircraft. Sort of. Cigar-shaped hull with four long outriggers, cylindrical objects at the end of each strut jetting longish orange flames. Silvery thing growing larger, turning, turning, orange flames growing much longer as it turned. Trying to get out of our way.

  It suddenly became huge, blotting out the view for a moment, and Baka-no-Koto shook, roaring like a gong from the collision. They went on, trailing bits of the whatever it was. In a small viewscreen by Genda’s elbow there was a view aft, a view of that ship, tumbling now, red fire coming out of it in odd directions, falling away, falling away trailing a plume of gray smoke. Sorry. Sorry, whoever you are.

  A distant keening sound now, mournful wail from a thousand sorrowing tongues. A familiar sound, rising in pitch. Sound familiar from a thousand old movies. Sound few people live to remember having heard. Ling felt a small, soft regret start up as he realized it was the sound of the air planing across Baka-no-Koto’s hull as they fell and fell. Surely, this isn’t how it ends. It’s as if all our lives are a scripted tale. Hero never dies. Hero lives, prospers, gets the girl, lives and loves, while only the spear-carriers fall, only the villains are erased...

  Outside, the landscape grew, mountains rearing, forests passing swiftly underneath. Ling Erhshan watched, entranced as the black shadow of their ship, racing across this strange new world, became larger, keeping pace beneath them, growing from a tiny dot to a big black circle in the twinkling of an eye. Watched it grow vast, a pall of deepening regret, shadow swallowing the light outside, until the ship crashed.

  Six. I Am the Only Being.

  Opsimath. One who begins learning late in life.

  I learned a lot of words early in life. A lot more toward the end, when I began to understand it was the knowing itself I treasured, rather than the utility of knowledge.

  Lots of words flooding out of my many minds now. Omnipotence, the quality of Almightiness, you see. Omniscience, strictly: infinite knowledge, hyperbolically: universal knowledge. In the there and then, I remember puzzling over that one. Did the man who wrote the Official Definition have some basis for thinking infinite was more all-encompassing that universal? I mean, the Universe is supposed to be everything. Maybe he thought there was a limited supply of things and ideas, somehow less than infinity... maybe he’d been listening to Georg Kantor.

  Omnipresent? That’s me. Present in all places at the same time. That’s me. God is not ubiquitous, but omnipresent.

  One of the bits of me forwarded its favorite word. Omnify. To make everything of; to account as all in all. To make universal. Yes, that was what had happened to me, all right.

  Bits and pieces and doppelgängers and iterations, all of them out there, all of them in here. At first, no more than a confused medley, a babble of voices that seemed like it would never settle down. Then, a pattern, imposing order on chaos. Maybe real, maybe no more than illusion. But it was something.

  The metaphor of the multiprocessing machine. Turing would have understood. As well as anyone submerged in the technological realities of millennial America. Millennial Earth. The questions go out, the answers come back, as if from a black box. As if from a million black boxes. But the black boxes know of each other, know all about each other, at need. Compare notes, see who knows what and who can do what. Solve the question and pass the answer back on up the line.

  Am I the Supreme Being and these my clockwork slaves? No. I am one with the many, all of them within me, with me... legions within? Then, has nothing changed? When I was human, there were legions within as well, all beyond reach, beyond knowing, and yet...

  The growing order continues to crystallize, even now, in this place beyond the reach of time. Within me, a sense of being more than just a collective entity composed from all the iterations and branchings that had ever had any connection with the many lifetimes of Dale Millikan. If that was all, I’d be no more than the others, who account themselves Angels.

  Somehow, within me now, everything. Across all time. All universes. I see the simultaneity of the Many Histories. And understand what I failed to understand when I was embedded in the flowing event-matrix.

  Are all things possible? If something is possible, is it real, somewhere out in the infinite reaches of the Multiverse?

  When I was a child, seven or eight perhaps, I found a game to play with myself. I’d be walking home, from somewhere, playtime with other children, baseball or enacting some cartoon show, on a fine summer’s day, afternoon sun crawling down the deep blue arc of the sky, late as usual, hurrying, fearing my parents’ wrath. I’d come to a fork in the road.

  I would stand there, wasting time, mulling things over, wondering which way would be quickest, visualizing how angry my mother would be when I walked in late for dinner.

  In the end, unable to pick, I would choose the path I hoped was the best, and would send forth my doppelgänger on the second-best choice. We knew from experience which paths were good you see, of the myriad ways home from a myriad starting points.

  But not the perfect path home.

  And I would walk. Walk along my chosen path. And, as I walked, I would visualize the doppelgänger, that other me, walking along his path. Shadow cast on the ground before him, just as my shadow was cast on the ground before me. Scrupulously visualizing his every footstep, so I could see just who would get home first.

  Sometimes, I got there first. Sometimes he did. Sometimes, he waited for me on the steps, and we fused and went on in together. Sometimes, when I was particularly late, I imagined him going on in and avoiding my punishment.

  Seemed only fair.

  And, one day, walking home, shadow rolling across the tawny ground of burned-brown summer suburban lawns, it occurred to me I had mind to spare for a more sophisticated version of the game. I could, you see, imagine the doppelgänger walking along. Imagine him visualizing me. Imagine him scrupulously visualizing my every footstep so that...

  On the path home then, stopping, stock-still, a bright eight-year-old, flooded with novelty. What if, I supposed, the doppelgänger was real, that I was merely the doppelgänger he imagined, a game conjured up to fill the long, boring minutes engaged in walking home to an unwanted supper?

  When I got home, I posed the question to my mother. What if? She, fuming over the fact that dinner had been on the table already for twenty minutes, only threatened to take away my library card if I didn’t pull my head down out of the clouds and stop wasting my time on such foolishness.

  I sat there and gagged down canned succotash and greasy hamburgers with friend onion, grease soaking into flattened white bread, and thought about it anyway. Wen
t in my room and read a forbidden book. Went to sleep when the sky grew dark. Slept a sleep seemingly without dreams. Woke up in the morning to the stark realization that I was the doppelgänger now, that the me who’d lived my life up to now was gone, gone without a trace, other than my memory of his existence, evaporating away with those unremembered dreams.

  Never told my parents I was a changeling. Nor any of my friends.

  Lived my life. Died. Became God Almighty, you see. Looked up the doppelgänger whose reality I’d stolen. Felt a hard, grinding envy when I saw what life he’d lived. My life. The life I’d given up.

  Awoke then to the true reality. I lived all of these lives. All of these men came here. Came here in the end. The truth? Where all things are possible, nothing is real. We all existed, and none of us.

  And... why me? Why me in particular?

  The others used to call that Bob’s Dilemma, in honor of his dismay at not being the One himself. After all, he’d spent his whole career working on the Big Questions, looking at the Why and How of things. Why not him?

  Why not you? Because you said it was all a game. You insisted, all along that it was an exercise in economics, nothing more. You said, I do it for money.

  A sneer. And you? Did you do it for something other than money?

  A shrug. What choice did I have, after you and your ilk set things up that way?

  Miss Mary had the answer, as usual. Stop bickering boys. This solves nothing. In the end, all the why’s have no answers. The Throne of God is no more than a void to be filled, deserted by its previous occupant. The Multiverse is a like one of the coin sorters banks used in my day. Coins roll down the slope and fall through holes. Why? Why this particular coin in this particular hole? Because it’s the right coin and the right hole. Everyone knows that.

  Cold comfort.

  Probabilistic comfort.

  But I still don’t know where God came from in the first place, or where he went, or why.

  I have a conjecture about the first question.

  And the second?

  Only a terrible fear that I will one day find out.

  Seven. At the Earth’s Core.

  Omry Inbar awoke, still embedded in a dream. I was lying in a soft bed, he remembered. We’d finished making love, Hiba and I. Lying there, snuggled in cotton sheets long ago washed soft. Conscious of my humidity, of our closeness. Comfortable with the softness of energy well spent. Hiba putting her hand on the side of my face, waiting, perhaps, for me to open my eyes and look into hers. Waiting too long, growing impatient. Waiting a while longer, then whispering, “Do you love me?”

  I remember feeling a little pang of regret. They always ask. Always. Why do they have to be told? What is it about words, words, words... Opening my eyes, looking into her soft brown stare, soft, demanding stare. Tell her the truth. Tell her. Opening my mouth to speak, and... Lying of course. We always lie, just as they always ask. Do they want us to lie? No one knows. They say not. But... then they always ask the unanswerable questions that call forth the inevitable lies...

  And then he opened his eyes on reality. Sudden shortness of breath, as if his heart had come to a stop. My God. The starship Baka-no-Koto was far enough away he could see all of it, part of it, at any rate, as a whole object. Huge disk sticking out of the ground at an angle, battered, broken, torn open here and there, insides spilled out on the ground, beyond it, that sky...

  Eyes rising from the ship, to the expected horizon, then rising again. Then again. Sick, sinking sensation forming in his belly. In the distance, there were mountains. In the distance, was a sea. In the distance was landscape, rivers and grassland and darker green that must be forest, all of it striped and puffed by white cloud and blue shadow.

  Mountains nearby, beyond them smaller mountains, colored blue by air, land beyond that, bluer still, bluer and bluer ‘til it was gone. As if I am sitting in the bottom of a bowl. A bowl with no rim. Overhead, a bright spark of sun, standing at high noon.

  Something like the Moon, half-moon hanging huge over the non-horizon, improbable moon, something very much wrong with it. What? Long, hard stare. Lighted half pointing up, up at the noonday sun. And... There is pale, faded, faraway blue landscape beyond the moon.

  Something wrong with me. Something wrong with my eyes. He put one hand to his head, a gentle touch, already aware of a hard, awakening ache, felt the rough cloth of an old-fashioned gauze bandage. A touch of wet, then there was a trace of red blood on his fingers.

  That’s it. I’ve got a concussion. Just seeing a little bit wrong. In a minute, it’ll be right again. Blink. Blink. Still the same. In a minute, it’ll be... Oh, no it won’t. Come to your senses, Planetologist Inbar. Things haven’t been right in the world around you for a long, long time.

  Other people around him now. Standing, sitting under the same vast, leafy tree that shaded him now, lying still on the ground. Kincaid bending over this still form, Amaterasu over that one. Over there, the angular black shape of Tarantellula, standing, little Brucie sitting by her feet, arms folded around his knees.

  Not far away, the Chinaman, Ling Erhshan, standing by himself, hands on hips, looking up into the sky, looking at that faraway moon, whispering, as if to himself, in singsong Chinese. Inbar tried to move, to sit up, and felt pain go through his head like a thunderbolt. Coughed, almost choking, and said, “Where...”

  Ling turned and looked down at him, face lit by a most unreasonable smile. Delight. Incredulity. Something else. Pleasure. Vast, vast pleasure. He said, “I think we’re in Pellucidar.”

  Inbar lay back, letting the throb in his head subside. Lay back and frowned. “Pellucidar? And where is that?” No answer.

  Images and more images. Ling, hale and hearty, standing, looking at the sky, yes, and me, lying here banged on the head, fighting double vision, but... Tarantellula, and Brucie Big-Dick, arm in arm now, still looking at that wonderful sky. And soldier Kincaid, and robot Amaterasu, bending over the fallen. Who?

  Here sits Rhino Jensen, weeping, bereft, clutching red bits of this and that to his sob-wracked breast. Little globes and bits of red shell. Mangled antennae, fragments of spindly arm and leg, whole at the joints, shattered in the limb. Something like an eye here, a bouquet of stalky fingers clutched in one shaking hand. Was this the part that he loved best, or is it that one?

  She looks, Inbar thought, like what’s left over from a crab feast.

  Amaterasu now bending over Lord Genda Hiroshige, winding white bandage round his head like a fine white turban, murmuring to him, sweet robot nothings, hands on him. Look at that. Does a woman know to comfort a banged-up man with sexual overtures? But she’s not a woman.

  Kincaid standing with her arm around Subaïda Rahman’s narrow shoulder, making the Arab woman’s relative smallness stand out. Arm around her, woman to woman. Women always comfort each other. But Rahman’s supposed to be a... and the American woman, much more like a man than any real...

  Inbar resisted the urge to shake his head, anticipating yet another terrible splinter of pain. These are silly thoughts. Unreal. Unmotivated. You’ve just been banged over the head and...

  Kincaid standing with her arm around Rahman’s shoulders, Rahman, head down, weeping into her hands, weeping silent tears. Injured? Apparently not. And lying at their feet...

  Inbar sat up, slowly, very carefully, treating his head with the utmost care, slowly came to his feet, slowly walked over and stood beside the two women. At their feet, Colonel Sir Qamal ibn Aziz Alireza was a mangled ruin. Well. Not so mangled. Not really. Not like Zeq had been mangled. But a ruin, nonetheless. Dark eyes staring at the wonderful sky, blood drying on his brow. One arm bent at an improbable angle. One side of his chest shallow, dished in. Dark places on his uniform, stains from fluids liberated by destruction.

  One of his feet was gone, boot and all, foot nowhere to be seen.

  o0o

  Hours later, when it was still noon, tiny sun blazing high overhead, they ate a somber meal of rations unpacked
from the wrecked starship, sat in a little circle on soft, dry greenish-brown grass, not far from two fresh graves. Jensen ate nothing, sat a little distance away, looking away from the group, away from the graves, away from the ship, looking toward some distant mountains, tall mountains so tousled with clouds you could pretend a real horizon, nothing but air and endless space, lay beyond. Rahman sat with them, but ate little, The rest of them seemed... all right.

  They sat, and listened, while Ling Erhshan bubbled over with delight, while he told them all about the inside-out world of Pellucidar, told them about David Innes and Abner Perry and the mechanical mole, all about the Mahars and Sagoths, about Ja the Mezop, about Jubal the Harsh One and Dian the Beautiful and...

  At some point, Brucie Big-Dick said, “I read that shit when I was a kid. Did you ever wonder if Jubal Harshaw was a literary back-reference?”

  A blank stare from Ling, impatient at the interruption.

  Brucie said, “You know: Stranger in a Strange Land.”

  Ling shrugged; no one else knew what they were talking about.

  Passiphaë Laing shook her head dubiously. “This Pellucidar of yours only existed in an old book or two, Professor Ling. I don’t think it’s possible for us to actually be...”

  He said, “You say that? You of all people?”

  She sighed. “Crimson Desert has some sort of reality, the reality of a perfect simulation. The... software driver for the net can emulate reality absolutely.”

  Ling felt a quick pang of impending disappointment. He said, “Then, you think we may still be within your... software universe?” I want this to be real. Still, it would be an easy explanation for why they’re still here; why they haven’t simply... vanished.

  Brucie said, “There was a theory about that, once upon a time. The notion that the universe itself was God, I guess. The Omega Point.”