Free The Transmigration of Souls by William Barton Page B

like insulated wires, red and blue and black, marked by various colored stripes, coming out here and there.
    Ham fisted. Hardly the sophistication you’d expect from the Great Renaissance. We do better work than this, even now. Almost as if it had been built by those old Germans, building for Apollo. Heavy. Redundant. Brooklyn-Bridge engineering they’d called it.
    There was a little chair, covered with fine white dust, a small control panel mounted on a console. Dials, meters, gauges, what looked like dead LCD readouts. Brute force toggle switches and big square push-buttons. All of them carefully labeled, in English, with bits of embossed color tape. Very enticing, that caged switch that said, “Power Main.” Flip it on and...
    “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