Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  “She’s like the Eleanor Roosevelt of the ocean,” she added.

  “Not anymore,” they all said. “Look.”

  They pointed. And Suzie looked, and saw, and it was awful.

  The whale, half alive and half dead, lay shaking and gagging on the beach. Her mighty eye now had a bad, zombie-like glow.

  Shit, thought Suzie. They were right; she knew better. She hated that they were right. Even more, though, she hated what she had done to the whale.

  “No matter how good your intentions are,” she muttered to herself, “you can’t put the lightning back in the bottle.”

  “Huh?” said the other Deaths.

  “Never mind,” said Suzie, and waved her hand and let the whale die again.

  And she turned to face them, ready to give a little lecture about how maybe death wouldn’t be so awful so much of the time if only they’d take time to learn a thing or two about being alive, and they could roll their eyes all they wanted to, and—

  But they were gone.

  She made her way up on top of the whale and sat there awhile in the wind and the rain, being melancholy and enjoying it, and wishing she had some chocolate.

  —

  That was a long time ago now. Felt like it, anyway.

  Suzie flurried to a stop in Milo’s new apartment. The leaves and shadows slowed and vanished, leaving her feeling tired, groping for the light switch. Wondering if Milo was going to be mad when he got back, since she had basically left him out there on the sidewalk (that ridiculous, dumbass sidewalk!).

  Well, the walk home would be good for him, mad or not. Milo needed to get his act together.

  She decided to dye her hair.

  A silly thing to do, if you’re a universal idea, like Death or Spring or Music or Peace. But Suzie had learned something interesting about people: They knew the wisdom of simply being busy sometimes.

  Chop wood; carry water. Do the dishes. Sweep the garage. Milk the cows.

  Dye your hair.

  —

  She was about halfway done when Milo arrived. Hands shoved way down in his pockets, frowning.

  “Thanks for the ride,” he said.

  “Sorry,” Suzie answered, head down in the sink, kneading her hair through rubber gloves. “I wouldn’t have been good company.”

  He just stood there, looking moody. As soon as he had a beer and changed his underwear, Suzie knew, he’d snap out of it (she knew Milo better than he would have liked).

  “Do you have any questions?” she asked.

  “No,” he growled. “No questions.”

  “Good, ’cuz when I talk, I get chemical yick in my mouth.”

  —

  They watched TV in silence. Deflated, Milo drifted off while watching a cat-food commercial.

  “You can’t let it happen, love,” said Suzie, dragging him awake again.

  He tried to roll over on his side, facing the wall, but she reached out, grasped his chin, and turned his head to face her.

  “If I do what I’m supposed to do,” he said, “if I leave the cycle, I leave you. If I don’t, I get deleted.”

  He sat up.

  “Who says Perfection is even desirable?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if I like my imperfections?” Milo asked. “I mean, when they say ‘imperfect,’ they’re talking about human desires, right? Like wanting someone to love you, and having a cool job and a car, and your kids go to college, and people admire you. And painful things, like if your mom dies, or you live in poverty and danger, or you have diabetes, or raccoons get in your garbage. That’s called ‘being alive.’ ”

  “It is painful,” answered Suzie. “That’s what I see when I take someone’s soul out of the world. So many of them are glad to be free of the pain.”

  “So what? You guys taught me that pain is an illusion.”

  “And Perfection frees us from…?”

  “Illusion. I know. But you’re talking in circles!”

  “You only say that because you don’t know Perfection. When you’re perfect, you become part of Everything, like Kool-Aid dissolving in water.”

  Milo’s hands were busy with nervous energy. He made a little bunny sculpture with part of the sheets.

  “I don’t want to join with Everything,” said Milo, “or dissolve. I’m happy being me.”

  Suzie bit her lip and hugged her knees. “Now who’s talking in circles?”

  Milo grunted in frustration, trying unsuccessfully to rip the bunny’s ears off.

  “Peace,” said Suzie. She took his hand, and some actual peace traveled up his arm and calmed him.

  “Maybe there are possibilities,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “What if you try really hard, and do the Perfection thing. Hear me out! Just get it done. And then tell them you don’t want to go.”

  “Go?”

  “Into the cosmic whatever.”

  “They’ll just tell me a math problem and explain that the answer doesn’t care what I want.”

  “You’ll have leverage, though. Credibility. If you’ve done the Perfection thing.”

  “Two plus two still equals four.”

  “So does five minus one.”

  Milo pulled her to him, kissing her.

  But she pulled away. She looked sad.

  “You don’t think I can do it,” he said.

  “I do!” she shouted. “It’s just that you tend to do, you know, too much. You try too hard. You’ve screwed things up before, taking things to extremes.”

  “I know. I have to be especially careful now.”

  “Remember the time you fucked it up so bad you had to come back as a bug?”

  “I said I know!”

  She played it over for him in her eyes, like a movie, an old life flashing before him.

  “I hate when you do that,” he complained.

  “Hush,” she said, baring her teeth in a certain way. So he hushed, and remembered.

  WATER CARTEL SKYHOOK, EARTH ORBIT, A.D. 2115

  He had been born fantastically rich, which was a chance to score big soul points. If you could survive early exposure to money and privilege and avoid turning into an asshole, the universe tended to be impressed. A hundred lives ago, Milo thought this kind of challenge was just what he needed.

  He had been born aboard a gleaming space yacht (past and future were much the same, as far as the universe was concerned), heir to the chair of the Interplanetary Water Resource Cartel, the company in control of all the water in the solar system. From Mercury all the way out to the Neptune ammonia mines, if you wanted water, you paid the cartel. You paid whatever the cartel told you to pay.

  He grew up aboard a private space station—Mother called it a “villa”—in orbit around the comet-smashed Earth. The villa supported a population of butlers, valets, cartel lackeys, and technical crew. From time to time, new structures were added. As a toddler, Milo requested a TerraBubble big enough to sustain his own private forest. As a young teen, he demanded harem chambers.

  Normal people, living in poorer quarters elsewhere in the solar system, were fascinated with Milo the way people in previous centuries were fascinated with movie stars. They ate it up when he behaved badly (on his fourteenth birthday, Milo shot his valet with an antique pistol, then had him resurrected by medical robots) and took a weirdly personal pride when he behaved nobly (like the time he donated the Black Sea to a little refugee girl who was thirsty).

  Like many children of privilege, Milo found that his primary difficulty lay in fighting boredom.

  He traveled around and fed his libido. By the time he was twenty, he had been to every brothel and nightspot from low Venus orbit to the nautilus caves of Titan. He tasted everything there was to taste, felt every sensation, and satisfied every urge on the human menu.

  He fed his mind, attending fancy schools, earning degrees in Game Theory, Leisure Theory, and Theory Theory.

  Like a lot of rich people, Milo co
llected things. He had a collection of antique automobiles, a collection of deadly snakes, a gallery of paintings executed by cats, and a ball of string bigger than the Great Pyramid, parked in orbit around Mars.

  His collections bored him. His travels bored him.

  He was sitting around one day, thinking about shooting his leg off with a particle blaster just to see if the robots could put it back on, when an item on the news feed caught his attention.

  It was a short film about Kennedy Pritzker Helleconia Gates, a daughter of the Helleconia Oxygen Cartel. Like Milo, she was rich and attractive. Unlike Milo, she was not young. At two hundred and ten, thanks to cosmetic nanobots, Kennedy looked a reasonably attractive thirty.

  “Bully for her,” muttered Milo.

  Now, reported the article, in her most recent surgical eccentricity, Ms. Gates had ordered her virginity restored.

  Milo sat up straight. He played this part of the article several times.

  “You can’t really do that,” he said, consulting cartel scientists. “Can you?”

  They explained to him that, yes, it could be done, in a physiological sense. The bored look in Milo’s eyes gave way to a lively fire.

  A fire of purpose, even zeal.

  He would seduce Kennedy Pritzker Helleconia Gates and collect her famous virginity.

  —

  He arranged for them both to be ribbon-cutters for the new Martian supercolosseum.

  “I liked what you did with the Black Sea,” Kennedy said, shaking his hand in the green room before the event. “You’re never boring when you make the news.”

  “Nor you,” replied Milo. Plunging straight ahead, he said, “After the ribbon-cutting, will you join me for dinner in my shuttle? I’ll cook for you. I make, as it happens, a terrific zero-g étouffée.”

  She turned him down with the faintest shadow of a laugh.

  Later, alone in his shuttle with a bag of potato chips, Milo reflected. He saw Kennedy for what she was: a life that had aged like whiskey, growing mellow and deep. He saw himself as she must see him: a haughty child, a vacuum of character.

  He couldn’t win her.

  Not the usual way, anyhow.

  —

  It came to him in a dream.

  Past midnight, disheveled in his silk dragon robe, Milo summoned the cartel engineers and announced his plan to overwhelm the pants off Kennedy Gates.

  “I will host the mightiest charitable ball in the history of humankind,” he told them. “There will be music by famous musicians, food by famous chefs, dances, narcotics, and erotics, hosted in a palace of my own design.”

  “Fine,” they all said. “Where?”

  “On the sun,” said Milo. “You will build me a palace on the sun.”

  —

  When a cartel chairman—or her son—tells you to build something, you build it.

  So they built Milo his palace. Put it together in Earth orbit, explaining that when the time came, it could rocket to the sun and be lowered to the surface. A thing called the “Yesterday Field” made it possible. The palace would be protected by an invisible lattice of exotic particles. The lattice would send the sun’s heat back through time—to yesterday, as it were—leaving the palace unburned.

  “The only problem…” said the scientists.

  But Milo was too excited to listen further. He jumped up and down, dancing, ignoring them.

  “It’s important,” they said, but he had his headphones on.

  —

  The construction of the Water Cartel Sun Palace took three years. It became the most popular media item on the SolWide stream, with millions checking their newsgroups hourly to watch the fantastic turrets and spires take shape above the ruined Earth.

  Milo concerned himself with one thing only during those three years, and he got that one thing. Kennedy Gates RSVP’d in the positive, on singing stationery, just twenty-four hours before launch. “I’ll be there,” she wrote, “one way or another.”

  The guests shuttled up to the completed palace the next day and entered a grand hall vast enough to have its own weather. Milo appeared on a balcony of polished obsidian, wearing a Nehru jacket and sunglasses. At his signal, engines blazed, the Yesterday Field shimmered, and they shot toward the sun in perfect style.

  Milo surveyed the throng from his balcony.

  Kennedy? He didn’t see her. Fuck.

  He had to leave the great hall to find her, but find her he did, drinking alone in the grand alabaster stables among the mighty Lipizzaner horsebots, feeding them apples from a leather shoulder bag. She wore a yellow sundress.

  “The closest thing I’ll ever have to children,” said Milo, nodding at the horsebots. “May I?”

  She handed him an apple. He fed it to his favorite, a mare named Elsie, who was programmed to tap-dance.

  “I should think,” said Kennedy, “you could have all the children you liked, without having to go to a lot of trouble.”

  “I think I like trouble,” he answered. “Besides, I’m picky. I can’t have them mothered by just anyone. They have to make up for my own poor genes.”

  Kennedy gave him a playful look.

  “False modesty doesn’t suit you,” she said. “But I like that you try.” She tossed her head to indicate the palace, all around. “I like the way you try.”

  She stepped up close to him then and touched his lips with an apple. He took it with his teeth and stood there holding it as if he were a boar’s head at a feast.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “a woman just appreciates a little effort.”

  With that, she brushed aside her shoulder strings so that her sundress began to fall open. It seemed almost to bloom around her shoulders. Then she stood on tiptoe and bit down on the opposite side of the apple.

  It was a perfect moment. The palace fired its retros just then and nestled into the surface of the sun.

  Immediately, it began to melt.

  A distant roar at first, and a trembling throughout.

  Uh-oh. It occurred to Milo, for the first time, to wonder why all of the engineers had declined to attend the ball.

  Solar fire came pouring back through time, through the Yesterday Field. All the heat and plasma and raw radiation from tomorrow—from five seconds from now—erupted like a fiery octopus around the towers.

  Milo had worked too hard and waited too long to be here with Kennedy Gates and her falling sundress and her apple and her famous virginity. His eyes held her eyes.

  She would have, he thought. She was going to. Did that count?

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She caressed his cheek with a gentle, exquisitely painted left hand.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m not really her. She always sends droids to these things. Parties wear her out these days. She’s not aging as well as they’d hoped.”

  Below their feet, a rise in temperature.

  Well, shit, thought Milo.

  The Kennedy bot retrieved a compact mahogany plaque from her shoulder bag and handed it to him.

  I, read the plaque, MILO GALAPAGOS ROCKEFELLER BUFFETT GALIFIANAKIS CLXIII, TOOK, BY ROBOTIC PROXY, THE SURGICALLY RESTORED VIRGINITY OF KENNEDY PRITZKER HELLECONIA GATES.

  Dated June 28, A.D. 2140.

  “It’ll have to do,” said Milo.

  “Well, good,” said the droid.

  He just barely had time to prop the plaque on one of the stall doors and stand for a moment, admiring it and stroking Elsie’s neck, before everything came apart and the sun swallowed them down.

  —

  Milo’s Sun Palace life was the cosmic version of flunking second grade.

  He had set himself a challenge, and he had failed. Privilege had turned him into a ridiculous, self-important goat.

  The universe sent him back to Earth as a bug. Usually you get to choose what kind of life you’re going to live, but not if you really screw the pooch. He became a cricket. In China. In 1903.

  This time around, he was a raging success.


  A little girl captured him and kept him in a wooden cage, hung from the ceiling. He learned to chirp when she pressed her nose against the cage and giggled at him. It wasn’t much, but it made her love him. Not many crickets get to be loved. Even fewer crickets receive elegant funerals, but when he died, the girl made him a tiny coffin and set him adrift amid lily pads on a pond in the city park.

  He went straight to the afterlife, redeemed somewhat, after that. Lesson learned, one would hope.

  The memory fell away, and Milo found himself back in his dumb apartment in the afterlife, looking into Suzie’s eyes.

  He blinked.

  “I got the cricket part right,” he noted. “I was an awesome cricket.”

  Thirsty. Was there beer in the fridge? He got out of bed to go see.

  Padded down the dark hall, felt his way around the corner into the kitchen, and opened the fridge to—surprise! Light! The power was on!—discover a twelve-pack of cold, cheap beer.

  He cracked one for himself and—hearing her sneak up behind him—one for Suzie.

  “Yuck,” she said.

  “Cheap beer is an acquired taste,” he told her. “Like expensive cheese.”

  “I had an idea,” she said, hopping up to sit on the counter.

  He waited. He sipped his beer.

  “You think you’re ready to really try and do something perfect?”

  “Actually, you’re the one who said—”

  “Do you even know what it looks like? Perfection?”

  Milo thought about it.

  He said, “No.”

  “Would you like to see?”

  He sipped his beer. He scratched himself.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Good. Come to work with me.”

  “By work, you mean…?”

  “Being Death. Picking up souls. Ending lives. Yes. One of the souls I’m picking up tomorrow is reaching Perfection. You want to see what that looks like? Come with.”

  “Are you supposed to do that? Take people with you?”

  She kissed him.

  He started kissing her back, but she pulled away and headed down the hall.

  “Six o’clock comes early,” she said. “Set your alarm.”

  “Six?”