Read The Transmigration of Souls for Free Online Page A

gesture, at her body. Sudden quirk of anger. “But you don’t dress like a lesbian. You don’t...”
    “My parents. My parents are very traditional.”
    Professor Wahid then, chewing his lower lip in dismay. “Why are we here then?”
    Feigned astonishment. “Why, to talk about the seminar. It’s... so seldom I get to talk to such an... intelligent, such a learned man.” Push a button, pull the chain...
    A soft popping of backpack thrusters and the ship was a golden wall before her, Inbar’s plump face looking out at her through his helmet faceplate. Pale. Fretful. A face that pleaded, let’s be done with this...
    Pale, fat face. Deep, brilliant, penetrating eyes. He was one of the few who’d tried to bother her, during the years of training, as she moved up and up, got on crew rosters, got up in space on orbital missions, got herself named as American Technologies Specialist on the first flight to the Moon. Bothered me. Though I wore the uniform, walked the walk, talked the talk. Told me, fatuously, insipidly, how much he liked women in short hair and trousers...
    All right. One of the few... cosmopolitan enough to see through the ruse. Well, Zeq of course. But he merely thought it was funny. Offering to get her dates with his female “pals.”
    She said, “Let’s go.”
    Only gratitude in his eyes now. Let’s go.
    o0o
    Looking out one of Ming Tian ’s small portholes from ten thousand kilometers up, the Moon was a vast yellow circle of light, a circle of harshly-lit landscape, mountains becoming real mountains, endless circular craters becoming visible on the face of the shadowy maria.
    Over the hump now, over the hump into the Moon’s gravitational field and falling straight down. Ming Tian was moving slowly, no more than eight hundred kilometers an hour, bare residual velocity. But we’re falling. Falling down to the Moon. Behind them, Earth was a tiny, blue and white crescent. A lost world. I remember staring at the Moon when I was a boy...
    Little boy Ling Erhshan, lying out on the orphanage fire escape, industrial stinks from the ruinous slums of Shanghai making the old brick walls of a two-hundred-year-old building seem damp and slimy, smelling the stench of Shanghai’s close-packed sixty million souls, staring up at the old white Moon. White like death. No. Always yellow to me. Warm and yellow like the sun. Yellow like life.
    The orphanage had had a little library, mostly children’s primers. A few adult Chinese novels none of us could read. Some books printed in Russian we could do no more than essay, sounding out the Cyrillic characters, getting that Siberian girl, what was her name? Anyushka, to tell us what the words meant.
    I remember finding that other book, Moon Man , printed in pinyin Putonghua , Chinese language in Romanic letters, a translation of an early twenty-first century story by some writer with an unpronounceable foreign name, Dutch, maybe English, name transliterated into simplified Chinese characters that meant “thimble valley.”
    Cover picture showing a muscular Caucasian hero in torn military camouflage, with sword and pistol to hand, beautiful, half-naked blond woman by his side, the two of them standing in an eldritch landscape, facing a red and blue tiger under a dark lavender sky, sky in which hung a blue-white crescent Earth. Realistic-looking Earth, because people had already seen it thus. Like the Earth hanging outside Ming Tian just now. The Moon I dreamed of seeing.
    Wonderful, impossible story about a middle-aged soldier, called up against his will to fight in one of his country’s wretched foreign adventures, author’s anger reminding me how foul the world had seemed to its denizens at the turn of the millennium. They should have known how very much worse it would get. Yet they did nothing.
    Story about a soldier standing on a mountaintop, defeated, watching as a cruise missile came in over the sea, smashed into the base of the cliff on which he stood. Nuclear