“Say yes,” Thomas softly advised.
“I’ll break his arm,” offered Gob, but Milo stopped him with the lightest of gestures.
“Yes,” said the man. And Milo grasped the man’s head and opened his neurochemical door.
“Go out and walk around and see how good everything is,” Thomas advised. “Milo needs your cell.”
So the man gladly left and did as Thomas said.
Later, eating dinner out of the turban man’s bowls, Milo, Thomas, Gob, and Seagram had a very simple but important talk.
“What is it?” asked Thomas, “this thing you can do?”
“Something natural,” said Milo. “Something the brain does, a talent some people have.”
“What’s next?” asked Seagram.
“I don’t know,” said Milo.
Seagram cleared his throat and spoke with quiet humility, looking into his bowl.
“I think I might have an idea,” he said. And he told them his idea.
Seagram thought they should “cure” the whole prison.
“How wonderful it would be,” he said, “if, instead of living like animals, we could have a civilization in here. A real one, where people work together and take care of one another. Where they do things not because they’re being beaten and killed but because they enjoy their lives. People have to have something to live for besides just staying alive; that’s what animals do. We need to evolve.”
“So Milo will go out,” said Gob, “and evolve everybody?”
“I think it should be their choice,” answered Seagram. “When they see how it’s made things better for us, they might trust him. But it’s going to take more than that. We’ll need to start teaching and learning from one another, or the brain-chemical thing, I’ll bet, will just wear off. Once they—we—have a new vision of what being alive is, we’ll behave differently.”
They sat silently. Meditating.
“We should get everyone to come to a meeting,” said Thomas. “One village at a time, starting here.”
“Yes,” said Milo, even though his very first thought was: Fuck no, they’ll just eat us.
—
They did not get eaten.
But they weren’t convincing, either.
Getting inmates to attend a gathering was pretty easy. Most of them were bored, so anything different was an automatic draw. But that wasn’t the same as being open to ideas.
They sat attentively through a brief talk by Thomas and Seagram. They even applauded testimonials from Gob and the naked turban man. But that didn’t mean they’d learned anything.
“We live the way we live,” said a man with a 100 percent–tattooed body, “because it works for us. The strong eat the weak. It’s natural.”
Murmuring. The crowd liked that.
“Yeah,” said Seagram. “But is that really working for you? Are you happy?”
“Is your mother a whore?” asked the tattooed man.
Laughter.
“Let me show you,” said Milo, advancing toward the man. “Maybe if you all saw—”
A small rock bounced off his shoulder.
“Ow!” he yelped. “Seriously?”
The assembled convicts moved in a single wave. They didn’t know what they wanted to do, but they felt threatened and wanted to do something.
“Let’s go,” said Milo, turning to his confederates. “Let’s go now.”
They might not have made it, except for Gob. The giant lifted people out of the way, and Thomas followed, throwing punches. Seagram waddled along, concentrating on protecting his own fat head. And Milo came last, every now and then shouting, “Off!” and people would back off long enough for them to get past.
They left the city and fled up corridors, working their way toward the surface. Some of the crowd lost interest; others kept following and throwing things.
“They want me,” Milo huffed. “Let them follow me. You guys take off down this next—here! Go that way! We’ll meet at Seagram’s tonight!”
“No!” yelled Thomas. “We’ll stay together and think—”
“Gob,” said Milo.
Gob grabbed Thomas and ran off the way Milo pointed, with Seagram following.
Milo turned left into the space divers’ ready room and threw himself bodily at the controls. The hatch opened. He took a minute, hyperventilating, soaking his body with oxygen, until he heard footsteps and shouting in the ready room itself.
Then he stepped into the air lock, shouted his lungs empty, and told the door to open.
Scraaaaaaape…psssssssssssssssssssssst!
The remaining pressurized air shot Milo into space, across the rocky surface.
And he swelled somewhat. And became cold and numb. Became fizzy and full and uncomfortable, as if his whole body wanted to sneeze but couldn’t.
But he slowed it all down, all his flowing and exchanging and burning. Slowed it down until he felt sleepy but not faint.
Then he got his feet under him in the light surface gravity and walked back to the hatch and the window and gazed calmly in at the mob, crushing and shrieking on the opposite side.
He tried to understand them. He tried to love them.
Good, said his old self.
He closed his eyes and meditated for a few seconds. Then he turned and loped away, out of their sight, across the broad, stony landscape that was almost totally dark, except as it was lit, just faintly, by the slowly turning firestorm of the stars.
—
He ran for a mile or more before choosing a hatch and imagining that it opened.
It opened.
—
When he reached Seagram’s later that night, his friends were waiting for him. Thomas looked a bit sulky.
And there were others. Milo recognized faces from the mob that had chased him, the mob that had seen him stroll away into space. There were ten of them, maybe. It was a start.
“You obviously know something we don’t,” said the man with the 100 percent–tattooed body.
—
Six months passed and found Milo living in a protein garden.
It was like a garden anywhere else in the galaxy, on a planet or in a greenhouse up in orbit. There were growing things, and not just slime. They had found ways to grind stone and waste into soil. They had engineered artificial seeds and built banks of blue-light generators.
Most people were smart, if you gave them time and peace of mind.
If you gave them a world where people weren’t terrified all the time, or angry.
The garden didn’t have a sky. It had stone. It didn’t have fresh smells and breezes. It had mildew and damp, the breath of caves and people. Milo and his first disciples tended the garden.
Everyone had jobs, and this was theirs. Milo planted and harvested. Gob maintained the machinery. Seagram engineered things. Thomas sprayed things and watered things and made soil out of stone and shit and dead inmates.
And there were others, building schools. Others, making drawings and paintings and nice things to put here and there and make the walls look nice, because if it didn’t look like a prison, then maybe it wasn’t a prison, really.
Yes, said Milo’s old voices, which were getting more and more smug by the day.
When they came to him for teaching, they came to the garden and sat in a great circle and touched hands all around. And Milo would start it off, a wave of images and sensory suggestions, and the wave would pass through them all until they opened their eyes and found themselves on warm green grass under a blue sky with white clouds. And flowers and birds all around. For a while.
That was the teaching: this imaginary garden that they could take away with them and remember and dream about.
Sometimes he went out and walked among them. They always gaped when they saw him in the corridors and the cities, as if he were something that belonged in the afterlife, or at least in hydroponics. They didn’t mob him as he passed. They just touched his linen suit (they were making better clothes now) and
felt blessed if he turned his red robot eye on them, this boy who had made them men and women.
He was always humble, at least on the outside. He took time to stop and talk, to tell jokes and be human. At first, he couldn’t stop thinking what a bunch of idiot scum they were and how he wished to God that some beautiful young women would commit crimes and get sent here to be his holy concubines. But he was getting better and kinder all the time, just like the rest of them. And he stopped thinking of them as low and dirty and dumb, especially when he saw the builders and designers and artists they became.
—
We’re going to make it this time, he thought he heard his ancient soul say.
Milo didn’t know quite what that meant, except for a deep sense that everything was perfect. That something wonderful was being achieved, just by letting things be the way they were supposed to be.
“Let it be,” he told his disciples and all his people.
“Let it be what?” they asked.
“Let it be perfect.”
“Oh,” they all said. “Okay.”
—
Sometimes he went to the space-diving air lock and let himself out. His favorite thing was to take off his clothes and tie a three-hundred-foot length of rope to a davit inside the air lock, and, instead of propelling himself across the surface, he would leap out into space with the rope fastened around his ankle and drift there for a time, his own self seeming to vanish into the starfield.
Soon, he was going out to the air lock every day. When he wasn’t inside cultivating the gardens or out being worshipped, he was floating in space, the most incomprehensibly happy life-form in the universe.
—
He was out there floating like that the day he saw the approaching cruiser.
He zoomed in with his mechanical eye, watching the ship fire thrusters, slowing down.
It had been a while. He wondered what sort of criminal they were dropping off. Whoever they were, they were in for a nice surprise. He gave his rope a tug, drifted back to the hatch, and made his holy way back to the garden. Soon enough, they’d come to tell him about the newcomer.
The door to the garden opened up, and two uniformed officials stepped in.
He saw them speak with Thomas and saw Thomas point down the rows of radishes, lettuce, and corn. Saw them walk in his direction, so he met them halfway, among the pumpkins.
A man and a woman, wearing court badges from Bridger’s Planet.
“Are you Milo Hay?” asked the man.
“I am,” he said.
How strange to hear his common name. For months now they’d been calling him “The Milo.”
The woman beamed at him and said, “We’re here to take you home.”
—
They had a hard time explaining to him that Ally Shepard had finally done enough weird and not very nice things to convince her family to send her to the hospital. There, they decided that she was a victim of a rare dissociative disorder that made it nearly impossible for her to distinguish between right and wrong. The thing that had finally gotten her family’s attention was that she gathered up a group of children from the park and took them on a “field trip” to a construction site, where one of the children was slightly bulldozed, escaping with bruises.
Under observation, she admitted that Milo Hay had not raped her one bit and that she was so sorry he was in prison now and probably dead, and when could she go home?
None of this could be explained to Milo while he was leaping over garden tables, trying to get away. He might have made it, possibly, but they threw stun whips around his head and dragged his unconscious, holy self back out of the garden.
Stun whips did it for his disciples, too. Even Gob.
Milo woke up, somewhat, out in the corridor and was fully awake by the time they reached the ready room. He screamed, crying and grabbing at things, scraping his hands bloody, before they were finally able to stuff him through the hatch and aboard their ship. With a thunk! and a hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissssssssssss! and a flare of mighty engines, they carried him across hyperspace, home.
—
His parents were no big help.
They understood that their son had been the victim of a terrible injustice, but now that he was home, he might as well give it all to the universe and its crazy God and let it go.
“I call it ‘Random Value Shift,’ ” his father explained. “It’s how a professor of zoology with five PhDs gets eaten by a tiger in the jungle. Doesn’t matter who you are; things will happen to you. It’s one of the primary tenets of divine allegory.”
Milo didn’t give a shit. Nobody cares less about theology than a god.
His parents didn’t understand why their brilliant, once-ambitious son was now content to waste away in front of the living-room window, talking to himself. Or why he got up at night to go stand in the backyard, naked.
He barely spoke. He barely breathed. The only time they were 100 percent sure he hadn’t died was when they took him to the hospital and he screamed while they removed his holy eye.
—
His old soul was in shock. All the memories of all his past lives couldn’t begin to understand what it must be like to be torn away from Unferth and his disciples and brought back to this small, silly place where he was a kid too young, still, for a driver’s license.
Milo, said his ancient soul, his old self: Understand it and accept it. This is small behavior. Overcome it.
Milo ignored the old voices. He tried to shut them up in their own little room, at the bottom of his mental sea, but none of that happy brain magic was working since they’d hit him with the stun whips.
It was like being amputated from himself.
—
After a year, he made an effort.
He tried until he was thirty years old. For fourteen years, he dragged himself through the trivia and the dullness of normal, everyday life. It was like trying to run a marathon race without legs.
He finished college with a C average.
He found that if he drank, he could be social, in a way. Could stand to sit in a room with people and listen to them babble. So he drank.
He got a job going to people’s houses and fixing things. Complicated electrical or nuclear devices. The work occupied him just enough to keep him awake, and it was not necessary that he talk to anyone very much.
At home in the evenings, he watched shows on his fish or on the wall unit until they put him to sleep. Sometimes he would buy marijuana. These things became a respirator for his soul.
—
Quite often, he found himself remembering a certain night in Unferth when he struggled with his memories of home.
To have nice, useless, distracting memories, or not to have them? He faced the same problem now. He reminded himself to be distracted, and imperfect, and human.
He was supposed to accomplish something, wasn’t he? Let alone saving the minds and souls of prisoners. What had happened to Lord Byron, the poet he was going to be? Or at least the professor he might have been?
He sprawled in a dull gray armchair. Here was what Napoleon might have been, if the army hadn’t worked out for him.
Milo put his hands on his head and tried to move neurochemicals around, but it was like searching an empty shoe box.
—
One day when Milo was thirty, Ally Shepard came to see him.
Ally was well. She was an associate professor of dramatic literature. One tiny phase-wave tweak to her cerebrum had put an end to being crazy and doing odd, inappropriate things.
She was happy, except for one thing. It agonized her, what had happened, long ago with Milo.
She knocked at his apartment door. This wouldn’t have worked, normally. Milo didn’t answer his door or his fish. But he came walking up the stairs just then, carrying a bag of groceries, including a twenty-ounce clamshell package of dope. He stopped on the top step when he saw her there.
“Ally,” he said.
(Milo, whispered his s
leepy, long-ignored ancient self. Do this right….)
“Milo. You look good.”
And damned if he didn’t rise to the occasion. Maybe because it wasn’t a small, tedious thing. It was a big thing.
He invited her in, and made dinner for them both, and got them both high. And when she lost her cool and dissolved in tears, trying to apologize and make up for all that trauma with mere words, he held her and let her apologize.
“Ally,” he said, “you don’t need to worry about that. You were sick. And you made it right. And besides, I enjoyed it, to say the least.”
Ally went home much improved.
—
The next day, also much improved, Milo bought a ticket to an orbital resort, where he ate lunch from a vending machine and then managed to find an air lock on a mechanical floor, with no one watching and no one likely to come by soon.
It was no particular trouble for him to get around the codes and make the switches work. He opened the hatch and, wearing gym shoes, slacks, and a light jacket, stepped through into the lock.
No, Milo, protested his very sad soul. It was the voice of a soul that had been on its way to a birthday party with dancing and free beer but was hit by a train before it got there.
Without preamble, he threw the emergency toggle inside the air lock and let the instant decompression blast him into space.
It was painful, since there was sunlight and radiation this time. Drifting away, between space and a twilight ocean, he roasted on one side and froze on the other. Within, he popped and fizzed and went dark.
For his last thought, he tried to think something holy, but a dying brain is a slippery thing.
I wonder, he thought, if the brothers of the Damocles Society still have that goddamn goose.
Milo woke up on the sand beside a slow clear river.
The sun in the white sky was a small, fierce, fossil sun. The sun of bleach and bones.
His memories of eight thousand years came back, as usual. He welcomed them and his sense of his larger self, as usual.
What was unusual was the feeling of gray melancholy in his stomach and soul. This, he knew, was left over from his suicide. It took a degree of emptiness to end your own life, and that emptiness didn’t wear away between worlds.
Reincarnation Blues Page 16