The Transmigration of Souls Page 7
“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...
Sky going all white, blinding them.
Crying out, covering their faces.
Alireza peered out through the dome with aching, teary eyes, blinking hard, saw brilliant golden sparks flying away on long trajectories, bouncing in slow motion across the dusty plain, saw a glowing ruby hole in the plain where Ming Tian had been, al-Qamar still standing there beyond it...
Filling his lungs, shouting, full of panic, shouting at the radio, “Mahal! Tariq! Get out of the ship! Now...”
Another tongue of liquid fire. Another blinding sky. Another livid hole bracketed by bounding sparkles of incandescent ruin, fading, fading...
The Americans’ winged spacecraft dropping slowly now on its column of fire, descending on an empty Lunar plain. Into the long silence, Ling Erhshan suddenly whispered, “We’re not going home, then...”
Two. Sartor Resartus.
The view from an infinite height.
The view from the Command Module, like the view from the center of some endless, multi-dimensional flower, petals of bright white light going out and out, stretching like brilliant shadows, shadows cast by the Throne of God, out in directions no hu
man mind can conceive.
I know these directions. Know them now.
Know of colors beyond any prismatic fathoming.
Know of times without number.
Worlds beyond kenning.
Effortlessly, I know everything, everywhere, everywhen.
I know when a sparrow falls.
I feel it in my heart.
View from an infinite height changing, shifting, malleable. The putty of creation molded to my touch. I imagine. There is being. I sigh. The reiterated powers to numbers no mathematician could construct unfurl. I imagine darkness. Darkness falls.
Pointless.
Why am I here?
Why do I... persist?
Is it because I still fear to go out into the eternal night?
Surely not.
They say God is Love.
I am not love.
That much is certain.
For a long time after I got the job, I feared I might really be God Almighty. Trembled with terror and longed eternally for the surcease of human sleep. No more. Not for me. Maybe the Other had these longings as well. I knew him not, though he almost certainly knew me.
I know when a sparrow falls.
Feel it in my heart.
The Other must have felt my fall, felt it as a pinprick, somewhere inside. If the Other had a heart. One of those things beyond my knowing, though I know all, see all, with a simulacrum of Odin’s All-Seeing Eye.
Out the window now, brilliant blue galaxies flowed by, blue spiral arms winding round fat red cores. I could reach out and touch the cores. Make them flame with renewed youth. I do not. I could reach out and change the decay rate of protons. I do not. I could reach out, let the ghost wind of the neutrinos sift like dust through my fingers. Could tell them all that their mass was changed, that the history of this universe or that one, or all of them put together, was changed. I do not.
Stars, like dust. Galaxies like grains of sand.
Let them be.
Let them live out their lives.
They don’t know.
Let them live on in the darkness, with their small fear, their fear of inevitable oblivion. I can remember when I feared that oblivion. Oh, God, I remember! Remember when I wished for the reality of God and feared it at the same time. Must I die? Now? Forever? Unfair. Damn you.
Sometimes, when I take these moments alone, when I look out through the Command Module’s infinite windows, I remember those fears and laugh. If you’d told me then, what was to become of me, I don’t think I would have had the sense to feel horror. No. I think I would have felt joy. First, no death. Then, the infinite power to create. The power to change.
I will... and it is so.
Sometimes, even when the work of Creation presses on me, I remember and, remembering, I laugh, striking fear in a million, billion, trillion... transfinite number of souls. I point to the idea of an idea, the spirit of a notion, I murmur, “Make it so...” and I laugh. No one gets the joke, though I could will them to understand.
Then the black despair descends.
I could will this all away.
I could make an End to All Things.
I didn’t ask for this job. It fell upon me, unbidden. (Oh, that lie! That lie!) Sometimes I tire of the task, as the Other must have tired. I thought of that, before I had more than an inkling of the Truth. I could let it all go, let it fall away into the darkness and be done. I could.
And yet.
I know when a sparrow falls.
I feel it in my heart.
Even God can’t imagine the pain of Creation’s End. If He had, He might never have spoken the Word. Might never have let there be light. Certainly, knowing what I know now...
Well.
In any case, I am still afraid of the Dark.
In those last few weeks, those few weeks before the Jug, I think I knew what was coming. Maybe we all did. But the NASA/NSF bureaucrats, the military authorities, politicians greedy for wealth and power, university scientists so wistful about the possibilities of their new knowledge...
And me?
Gone mad, absolutely mad, with the splendor of it all.
If I’d known what was to come, would I have done the right thing? Would I have known the right thing when I saw it? I still don’t know. Maybe I did the right thing after all.
Maybe, if I’d known what was to come, I would’ve gone right through the gate, following poor Astrid Astride and her fleeing troopers. Would have helped her shut and wreck the gate under the Moon. Would have gotten aboard the ship and ridden home to America in her arms.
Maybe. Just maybe. We could have lived happily ever after.
Is it too late now?
Could I step back into the byways of the Multiverse and lead her home?
Or even lead her here?
I feel the great pang of her in my heart now.
The pang of a sparrow falling.
My own personal sparrow.
She deserved better than the likes of me.
Too late now, even in the multiverse. Even in the land where all things are possible. When I came here, the datatracks merged. All the universes where Dale Millikan lived converged. Converged on this spot. Others have their separate infinities. All I have is infinite Oneness.
I remember how Jesus laughed when I said it: I am that I am.
Oh, you fool. You arrogant fool.
So we fooled with the infinite knowledge base. That filthy knowledge of good and evil. Found the gate under the Moon, went out in the footsteps of the Scavengers, in the footsteps of the Colonials, walked the byways of the multiverse... and so the Space-Time Juggernaut came to set things right again.
The Bird of Fire coalesced in the sky, and we wondered if we were looking on the face of God, if this was indeed the bright Angel of Death.
Death, it seemed then, was the right answer.
Troopers become bones, clean bones gone... a smile, even then, in the face of eternity. I never can stop thinking these things.
Somehow, the scientists and I were trapped, wise men and women wide eyed, looking to me for guidance. Imagine that. You. You, Mr. Millikan. A man of action, someone who can do, while the rest of us merely be.
Now, we can’t go back through the gate on Mars-Plus. Can’t get back to the cavern under the Moon. The Jug is there now. Fire in the sky. Snapping up the trooper-girls one-two-three... are you alive, my beloved Astrid Astride? Or will I find you no more than a pile of clean bones one day?
I fancied I heard her voice, I still live.
On a little desert world in a galaxy far, far away, where we’d been following the trail of the last Scavengers, reading their words, written on scraps of this and that, I stood before the gate controls and considered. Stay here? Wait it out? What if the Jug takes Earth? What do we do then? Go back to Mars-Plus? No. Jug is there. Waiting for us, perhaps.
Will he find us here?
No way to know.
Have to do something.
Please, Mr. Millikan. We trust you.
Well, shit. Fancy that.
So I spun the dials and snapped the switches and watched bright rainbows spill out on hot, white-lit gypsum sand, and looked through at a red sandstone world, pink sky above a rubble-field of frosty red stones, sky dark toward zenith. Men there, inside the dome we’d set up over the gate, turning to look at us, wide-eyed with fear.
Outside the dome, I could see one of the new Scavenger-model spaceships we’d been fooling with. The one that had brought this gate hardware to Mars. The real, red Mars, our own Earth a blue-white spark in its sky.
“Let’s go!”
Watched the scientists scuttle through, until only I was left.
Now me.
Go home, you fool.
Go to Mars. Destroy the gate. Fly home to Earth in the spaceship. Wait things out. Maybe the Jug will just pinch off our gates, once we’ve all gotten home. Maybe it won’t finish us off.
Like the Scavengers, apparently.
Like the colonials.
Go home, Dale Millikan.
Go home to Astrid Kincaid.
Maybe she’ll love you, even without the romantic backdrop of the Multiverse to fool her. Go home. So what if the Multiverse is closed to us now? We still have the Scavenger technology. Still have... my God. Spaceships! We have their spaceships. Go home.
One day. One day perhaps. You’ll stand with Astrid Astride on the surface of Iapetus, looking up at brilliant, yellow ringed Saturn and... oh, God. Those old dreams shrunken away to nothing at all in the face of all we’d found.
If I go home, I abandon the land of all my dreams and... I stood staring through the gate at them for a long moment, scientists and technicians looking back at me curiously, wondering what was keeping me. I spun the dials, punched the buttons, watched rainbows spill back into the gate, and then Mars was gone.
Stood alone for a long time on the white sand surface of a world with no name, fallen Scavenger ruins half buried in the background, low mountains rising above the distant horizon under a pale, blue-white sky in which hung three small, bright white suns.
What do I do now?
Go.
Go back to the world of your dreams.
Cringe of fear.
What about the Jug?
What if the Space-Time Juggernaut finds you?
So what? You’re almost sixty years old now, Dale Millikan. Not going to live forever... I thought that then, used it to soothe my fear. What if I’d know that, going home, I’d’ve walked into an immortal time-frame where I could, truly, live with Astrid Astride, happily ever after? What would I have done?
But I didn’t know.
Just knew that I couldn’t bear to lose all the worlds of all my dreams.
Somewhere, out there, perhaps, Valetta the Slave-Girl waited for Dorian Haldane to come. Or maybe, somewhere out there, Valetta the Slave-Girl waited for Dale Millikan to come. Somewhere out there was a dream that overshadowed reality. Somewhere out there was a dream that washed Astrid Kincaid away.
So I dialed up a world of bright lavender skies and stepped on through.