Read The Transmigration of Souls for Free Online

lightless now.
    I’ll be almost sorry to be down on the Moon, back in gravity again. This dreamlike dance. Image of a woman, perhaps no more than fifty years old, perhaps no more than twenty years from now, dancing this dance out among the asteroids, out among the flying hills of Saturn’s ring system...
    Just the second step, that’s all. Remembering President Morwar’s speech, twelve short years ago. Twelve years since President Morwar and his scientific advisors decided there was only one way out of the world’s inevitable downward spiral. One way for us , at any rate, for the desert UAR and its relatively small population. We can survive, you see. But the rest of them. They will drag us down. Forty billion people in the world today. Forty billion, of whom the Arabs constitute less than one percent. One percent of the world’s people holding five percent of all the land, holding ten percent of all the material wealth.
    Compare that to the five billion already starving in the princely states of Hind, to three billion Europeans in their own patchwork quilt of tiny republics. To the seven billion of southern Africa, to the six billion in South America. To the eight billion of Greater China, Green China, which had expanded to fill Siberia and Central Asia, had come all the way to the Ural Mountains.
    To the billions of southeast Asia and Mexico and Central America. Even to the hundred million of isolated Canada, to the four hundred million refugees now crowding poverty-stricken Australia’s dry red deserts...
    You could look at all the old graphs and all the old plans, and you could see that no one ever extended them far enough. Far enough to see that, no matter what you did, no matter how draconian your solution, the world would come to an end, some time in the late twenty-second century, or early twenty-third.
    President Morwar looking at his advisors. Gentlemen, that time is now. We have perhaps a half-century to do what we must, for, sooner or later, those starving billions will come for what we have. Come and take it, and then we’ll all go down together.
    And the Americans? A shrug. Who knows what they’ll do? Waiting for them to save us would be like waiting for... I don’t know. Waiting for the Archangels to come down and wash away our sins.
    I was just a graduate-school girl then, trying to pass my courses, make honors, trying to keep grope-handed professors out of my skirt without offending them.
    Sharp memory of that skinny, dark Sudanese mathematics professor, the one who held the honors seminar in advanced multivariable topology. Sitting beside her that afternoon in a back corner kiosk at the library, making her suddenly very sorry she’d worn that short dress, putting his hand on her thigh, grinning, tucking his fingers between her knees, making that little prying motion...
    What now , little girl? An “honor” mark from this greasy little man is your ticket to the next level. And you do so want to be accepted into the astronaut corps. Applications have to be in by the first of Hazirahn, and...
    But the image that called up. Lying on her back, dress pulled up, legs spread, his garlicky hummus-breath in her face...
    Mmmh. Mmmh. This feels soooo gooood , little girl...
    Small crunch of revulsion. Not against the act, which had been... rewarding, perhaps, the few times she’d tried it with... suitable boys. No. Against the implication. The implication.
    Fingers prying at her thighs now. That other hand stealing up her arm, headed, perhaps, for a breast or two...
    All right. Then think of something, little girl.
    She’d smiled and taken him by the hand, patted him on the wrist. “I know just how you feel, Professor Wahid. It’s so frustrating when a girl won’t just... go along with it.”
    Puzzled look. “What do you mean?” Those fingers between her thighs relaxing just a bit.
    “Well. You know I’m a lesbian, don’t you?”
    She’d almost laughed at his comic gape. “A lesbian? But...” A