Free The Transmigration of Souls by William Barton Page A

before...”
    Right. Memory of a ridiculous woman’s voice, grating in his ears. Old fashioned Arabic, full of heavy consonants and sharp sounds. Guttural stops where glottals should be. Like the Arabic of my country cousins in Hejaz, rather than the crisp, modern sounds of bälädi , Dialect of the Cities, the Arabic you heard on the nets, were taught to use in school...
    And Zeq, suddenly popping out of the rabbit hole: “Qamal, Omry, you have to come see this!...” Stopping suddenly, at the sight of Ling.
    Inbar put his hand out, touching the arm of the Chinaman’s suit. “There’s... something here. We don’t know what.”
    Alireza felt a quickening surge of... what? Ownership? A desire, at any rate, to prevent this... foreigner, he supposed, from seeing the underground gallery. Silly. Not mine. Not ours . In just a little while the Americans will come and take it away from us. Try to, at any rate.
    Sigh. “We’ve got about half an hour. Let’s go look.”
    o0o
    Subaïda Rahman was standing by the rear wall of the underground chamber, perhaps a kilometer from the entrance, with its balcony and stone stairs. Anomaly after anomaly. Now this... thing. Most of it had been merely strange. Inexplicable. Funny looking bushes and trees. Bits of machinery that were like nothing she’d ever studied. Not stuff from the Renaissance, certainly. Not much like the few bits and pieces that had escaped from Fortress America over the years.
    Memory of being in the top secret government laboratory south of Äwbahri, at the terminus of the Fäzzan rail line, buried in the hardpan desert of Idehan Marzuq. Hot desert wind without, cool airconditioning within, while her colleagues lowered the little silver helmet over her head...
    Just found it out there, floating in the sea, though something that felt this heavy and dense to the hand should have sunk like a stone...
    Feather light on my head though.
    How does it feel?
    All right.
    Can you see anything?
    No.
    How about when I do this?
    Well...
    Pins and needles at the base of her spine, building, building...
    The sudden orgasm had made her surge from the chair, ripping the thing off her head, standing almost bowlegged, then almost knock-kneed, crying out...
    Male scientists staring at her in puzzled astonishment.
    Maryam, the one other woman on the team coming forward suddenly, brushing back her short, stiff hair, looking into her eyes, seeming nonplused.
    Did what I think just happen to you?
    Shaky whisper, Yes. Yes, I think so...
    Maryam picking up the little silver helmet, smirking, We could make a lot of money, if we could learn to manufacture these...
    Shaky laughter, ignorant male colleagues gathering round, demanding to know what was going on.
    Dr. Saddiq taking the thing from Maryam, saying, Well, maybe we’d better try harder to find an English dictionary with this word in it. Tapping the front of the helmet, where it said, Orgonogenesis Inc .
    Who wants to be next? Mahmuhd?
    Maryam and Subaïda hid their smiles until after the young man went through his version of the experience. Tried not to laugh when a stunned Mahmuhd excused himself to go change his linen. It was a few days before someone figured out the connection to the word orgone , which had been in their dictionaries, all along...
    This thing on the chamber’s rear wall though... not like that at all. More like an altar to some technological god, some typically American god. Big smooth sheet of what looked like polished black formica, set flush with the rear wall, coated with a thick layer of plastic sealant.
    Not quite featureless. If you leaned close, you could see rainbow refraction, an interplay of colors just like the ones you saw on the surface of a 20th century videodisc. Microscopic pits in the formica? Invisibly tiny bubbles, like dust motes in the plastic coating? Or some property of the plastic itself?
    There was a heavy frame around the thing, marking out an area perhaps twenty meters square, things