Read Online The Transmigration of Souls by William Barton - Free Book Online

between Earth and Moon, there would be more company. Or maybe just a warhead. Should we do something? What? Nothing to be done. We don’t even have a pistol among us. Not expecting to meet anyone on the Moon.
    All around them, boxes and crates and piles of hardware, little American moonbuggies in various stages of disassembly. Two large, boxy structures that looked, more or less, like late-20th century mobile homes. Rahman was standing by some kind of long bench, looking down at jumbled equipment, silent.
    Alireza came up beside her, peering down through faceplate glass. “What is it?”
    Rahman turned it over, a complex structure made from what appeared to be thin, thin strands of gold foil. Strands of foil that looped through and through each other, twisted and turned, never seeming to touch one another, never seeming to get closer to one another, even when you put your glove on the object and pushed...
    “I don’t know.”
    Odd looking, deep inside. Like there were misty places somehow. A little bit like that famous painting of the stairways, stairs leading into one another in impossible ways. “Like,” Rahman whispered, “there are singularities here.”
    Alireza turned and looked up at the sky. Felt a slight shock. Minutes had passed and the Chinese ship was coming down, a little metal spider riding a flower of bright flame. Down, down, cloud of dust...
    The flame went out and the other ship was sitting out on the plain, much closer than al-Qamar . Alireza thought, Whoever it is, he’s a better pilot than me. He looked around at the base. All right. So we’ve found a dome, two housetrailers, and a lot of leftover junk. The equipment in here’s not even as good as our own. Old junk. Antiques. Then why would...
    Zeq’s voice in his earphones. “There’s a door here.”
    “Where?”
    Zeq’s spacesuited figure, waving from beside a humped up place in the floor, near the far foundation wall. Another airlock? Not likely, given they’d already found three, spaced evenly around the walls. They went over and looked.
    Zeq shined his helmet light inside. “Just rock, covered with some kind of spray-on sealant.”
    Rahman said, “Makes sense they would’ve built underground. In its heyday, this base had over a hundred people living at it. Couldn’t fit that many people under this dome. This is just the construction shack.”
    “Why didn’t they take it down?”
    “Why bother? It makes a pretty good work area and airlock system.”
    Alireza said, “Mahal?”
    “Here.”
    “Keep an eye on the Chinese. Let me know when they come out.”
    “All right.”
    He looked at Inbar. “You stay here. We can try to use you as a radio link if the signal gets cut off.”
    A nod through the faceplate, a look of almost-relief.
    The dark tunnel was short, featureless, without anything that looked like a light fixture, ending in another door, an old airlock door set in a hull frame, frame buried in the rock wall. Alireza stood for just a second, looking at it, then reached out and popped the latch. Light, bright white light, like natural sunlight, came flooding through.
     “What in Shayol ...” Rahman pushed past him, pulling the door open, stepping into the next chamber.
    Silence. The three of them almost huddling together, spacesuits all but touching, looking down off a rough hewn stone balcony, down a long flight of fresh-cut stone stairs, at a vast underground chamber, giant cavern full of sourceless, hazy morning light, with green trees and rosebushes in bright red flower, broad lawns of grassy sward, buildings, like some remote mountain village, clustered in the near distance.
    Inbar’s voice crackled in their earphones. “Mahal says you’d better come up. Chinese have broken out their rover. At least one individual is driving your way.”
    Zeq said, “I wonder if this is some kind of optical illusion.”
    Rahman: “You mean, like the VR art that was popular in America back then?”
    Alireza said, “We’ll