The Transmigration of Souls Read Online Free PDF

hanging in space, motionless, a few hundred meters away, sunlight almost blinding on its featureless, white-painted hull.
    I can’t believe I am actually here.
    Chang Wushi muttered, “We crash into that thing, you’ll believe it.”
    If only for just a moment.
    o0o
    “It looks,” said Kincaid, “like an old MiG-21 standing on its tail.”
    The little techie, who’d said his name was Bruce, stood quietly at her side, looking at the Scavenger scoutship, hands in the pockets of his artfully roughed-up blue jeans, hair blowing in the warm, humid Pacific breeze. “Guess so.”
    Tall, thin, aerodynamically clean hull. Flat nose inlet with a shock-deflector cone poking out. Smallish triangular wings midway up. Four skewed-vane landing legs around the base. No bubble canopy, though. Little round windows, like the windows on an old-fashioned airliner, arrayed in neat little rows. And sixty meters tall, four meters in diameter. Painted silver. Other techies clustered around that base, doing something to the engine. Men in uniform going up and down a ramp that extruded from between two landing legs, leading to a small, brightly-lit hole near the bottom of the hull.
    If this was a real rocket, they’d be walking into a fuel tank.
    Real rocket. Like the ones we had back then.
    Not this magic thing.
    I wonder how much this is like the one Ethwÿn Nasóól found, when he came through the stargate on Æghóng and found his first abandoned Colony? Maybe like this, maybe not. Visuals in Scavenger literature were hardly evocative. More like exploded diagrams, interladen with numbers and subillustrations.
    Language hard to read too, even when you knew it well. Not like a human language. Even the driest technical literature more like some complex form of poetry, vertical rows of complexly structured pseudo-ideograms, with parenthetical remarks strung out on either side, paragraphs, if it was fair to call them that, more or less like a Scrabble board after the game is done.
    The techie, a scrawny man with thin, sparse sandy hair who looked like he ought to have thick glasses covering his washed-out blue eyes, elbowed her hard in the ribs, standing way closer than he needed to, and said, “Sure are glad you folks decided you need this. We’ve had her ready to fly for fifty years.”
    Looking up at her, eyes sparkling.
    Not looking into my eyes, no. Looking at my tits, the way they push out the front of this old uniform tunic. Well, you little shit...
    The man had a habit of ostentatiously pissing in public, too, bellying up to the side of whatever building was handy, unreeling a pecker twice the size it ought to be, looking around to see who was watching.
    All right. You can have anything you want, these days, so little Brucie here bought himself a big dick. All right. So why is he still only five-three? My toy soldiers all look like fucking Neanderthals and gorillas and comic-book monsters. Is that any better?
    Brucie elbowed her in the ribs again, standing closer still, and said, “Ah, say, Sergeant-Major?” She looked down at him. Sudden thickening of a fake Southern accent. “I wonder if y’all’d like to go off with me fer a quick fuck?” And now, eager like a puppy.
    Disbelief. Here I am, standing next to a man who may be a hundred-fifty years old, and he says...
    “Come on, Sarge. Be a sport.”
    All right. Hundred-fifty-year-old teenager. Sudden memory of Roddie opening up his birthday present. Amaterasu awakening, filling up with ersatz love. And Roddie bending her over the table, mushing her lovely little tits down in the birthday cake, cornholing her right in front of everyone, while his guests clapped and cheered him on.
    A whole country full of centenarian teenagers.
    Because never dying means you don’t really have to grow up.
    Brucie reached out, as if reaching for one of her breasts.
    “In your fucking dreams, asshole.”
    A sudden crafty look. “Yeah? Well, I’m sure your specs are in the net somewhere, Sarge.