The Transmigration of Souls Read Online Free PDF Page A

building up...
    Zeq looked up from his console, looked out through the pilot’s window, and the bright yellow landscape of the Sahara desert just went down, dropped out of sight, as al-Qamar rose on its pillar of translucent fire, like an elevator into the sky.
    What shall I say? thought Ahmad Zeq. To the world, he whispered, “ Alhamdulilah .”
    o0o
    From a little more than 200 kilometers up, the Earth turning below was, for Ling Erhshan, an unbelievable sight. No amount of preparation, the viewing of any number of old films and tapes and VR sensies... Not Mercury-Gemini-Apollo, nor all those old IMAX films, nothing the Russians had done, nothing from the American Renaissance and their return to the Moon in the middle of the last century...
    Nothing. That was it. Absolutely nothing.
    While Chang Wushi twiddled his pilot’s controls, muttering singsong under his breath, a man caught up in the heavy work of talking to himself, while Da Chai monitored the ship’s systems and struggled with a recalcitrant rendezvous radar, Ling stared out the window, spellbound.
    Below, the Pacific was a featureless expanse of shiny blue water. Glittering. Shimmering. Catching sunlight off the wavetops. Not a cloud in sight. How can that be? Not a cloud in sight, and I can see for ten thousand miles. Down by the horizon, where a little band of light blue air separated the dark blue of sea from the black of space, moonrise. Full Moon bulging up from the wall of the world. Somewhere, out there, my Arab comrades are halfway to the Moon. Regret? No. The more who go, the more likely we are to stay. This time.
    The image of their ship, seen on the video net just hours before the first Chinese tanker was due to lift off had been... well. “Futuristic” was the word he wanted to use. Though they were all living in the future now, that was certain. A legacy from Twentieth Century America. A legacy from all those pathetic old writers who dreamed of space and more space, of impossible things like time travel and silly things like pills taking the place of food...
    Da Chai said, “Professor. I need your help.”
    Terse. Sharply spoken. A rebuke.
    But the view out the window...
    He turned away with a sigh. “The problem?”
    Da Chai tapped the radar CRT. “The periodic update is leaving ghosts. Well. I think they’re ghosts. But they also get updated, and now I can’t tell...” Frustration in his voice.
    Ling looked at the screen and shrugged. “Yes. We never did solve the sprite problem. If Chen Li were here...”
    “But he’s not. Can you fix it? Do we need to get him on the radio?” Tapping on the screen again, angrily. “One of these things is the Tanker. I need to know which one.”
    A slow nod, another sigh. Pull yourself together. Transcend. This is an adventure, yes, with so many aesthetic qualities, but... he folded down the radar computer’s hidden keypad and tapped, blanking the image, scrolling numbers, reading stored values, data from error traps they’d left in place when the schedule slipped and the software wasn’t quite ready. Yes. Not quite ready. Just ready enough.
    The radar control subsystem had been whipped up from a twenty-year-old Japanese design. You’d think, they could come up with a new design, somehow, some time... But, under Chinese tutelage, the Japanese seemed to lose their spark of usefulness.
    Tap. Tap-tap. The screen blanked and came up again, this time with only one image of the tanker, bracketed by glowing white numbers. Range. Relative velocity. Offset vector...
    Chang Wushi said, “Never mind. I’ve made visual contact.”
    A look of repressed hostility from Da Chai. Ling Erhshan smiled and shrugged. I told you, if only Chen Li were along... No point in that. By the living spirits that inhabit everything, we’re going to the Moon! Going last, it’s true, but going. He felt the skin of his face flush, warm with delight as he turned back to the window...
    Sudden pang. The unmanned tanker was