Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  Milo, in the end, fared less well, having the poor judgment to return too soon. He joined the ranks of Vienna’s defenders during the Ottoman siege in time to learn that VanFurzelhaas had been placed in partial command of the defenses. His arm proved long enough to have Milo assigned to a particularly hot spot upon the ramparts, wherefrom he was famously captured and launched by catapult back into the city.

  —

  Sometimes, between his first hundred or so lives, Milo tried to spend his time with Suzie, though they weren’t yet lovers in those days. They both enjoyed swimming and food. They enjoyed asking each other questions like “Would you rather lose an arm or an eyeball?” And sometimes Milo thought he caught her looking at him a certain way.

  He wondered what would happen if Death went to bed with a plain old mortal man.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It might destroy our friendship. It might even burn you up. Like, literally consume you with fire. I seriously don’t know.”

  Milo was flustered. “Can you read my mind?” he asked.

  “I thought you knew.”

  “Well, don’t. Jesus!”

  After his hundredth life, he helped her open an exotic-food store called the Chocolate Squid. The store was fully stocked with squid and chocolate-covered butterflies and flowers you were supposed to dip in cheese, and more. When the gods tried to do human-style things, Milo observed, they often missed the mark.

  The whole year the store was open, only fifteen customers came.

  After Suzie closed the door for the last time, Milo tried to kiss her, but she turned away.

  “I’m serious about the burning-up,” she said.

  —

  On Earth, life after life, Milo fell in and out of love all the time.

  He knew thousands of ordinary loves, the sort that grind out years like sausage.

  He knew the love of family and good friends. He loved things like beaches and rain and well-made clocks. He knew what it was like to watch love flake away and die and leave you feeling as if you’d been eaten by wild pigs.

  —

  Once, in eighteenth-century Zambia, love saved Milo’s life. The love of an entire village. The love of hundreds of people.

  What happened was that Milo had a string of bad luck. Poor farming, drought, a snakebite, his mother died, a toothache, his house burned down with all his tools and possessions. Broke, tool-less, and too proud to ask for help, he became angrier and angrier, until one day he followed a wealthy man into the forest and beat him and took his money.

  It was a small village, so of course he was identified. Some constables came and got him and brought him to the schoolhouse to face trial.

  In many villages, Milo might have been beheaded or had his hands chopped off. But villages are all different, in one way or another, and Milo’s village had an advanced idea of what a trial was supposed to be like.

  An odd kind of trial (it was an odd kind of village).

  What they did was love him.

  How they loved him was that a couple of hundred people spent hours reminding him what a good person he was. They reminded him of how, when he was a teenager, he had saved a small child from a hyena, taking the brunt of the hyena’s attack upon himself. The child was in her twenties now. She touched the deep scars on Milo’s arm and spoke softly to him.

  They reminded him that he had once walked to the Congo and back, just to visit his grandfather. He had worked on a highway crew for four years so that his younger brother could go to university and become an engineer. He refused to kill animals, even rats and snakes and spiders. He had also married the ugliest woman in the village, because he saw past the outside and romanced her heart, but no one said this aloud. The wife herself was there and reminded him how he sometimes got up early and did her chores for her, so that she might have time to herself.

  When the villagers were finished, their love had untwisted the angry knot that had formed in Milo’s head and soul, and they made him remember that he was good. And he went on his way and lived his life and was grateful. In time, with hard work, his luck changed, and he lived until he died.

  —

  He was a man named Owen who loved a man named Brad, in the Gayborhood section of Houston. They lived together in a small apartment and had a dog named Maggie. They lived together for fifteen years, until Maggie died and Brad was offered a dream job that took him to Switzerland. The choice was agonizing. It aged them.

  —

  He was a woman named Oko whose husband drowned in a sea battle. She became a famous widow, setting a place for her husband at the table every night. She waited for him on the rocks by the sea. At first she looked for his ship on the horizon. Then, as time passed, in the water itself, as if he had passed from one world, the world of having a body with arms and legs and hair and teeth, into another, the world of having the Earth itself for a body. Streams and currents were his arms. Storms were his voice. The moon and constellations were his changing thoughts and moods.

  He had not been a handsome man. Sometimes she saw a fish that wore his face.

  IOWA, 2025

  High summer.

  Blue sky above and green corn below.

  In the middle of the green, four silver ARK ships, each the size of an ocean tanker, lay waiting on the grass, their noses lifted into the soft wind. Depending on where you stood, the ships reflected either the sun or the grass and corn.

  It was, thought Milo, standing miles away, near the fence at the ARK perimeter, as if each ship were a world trapped in a mirror.

  He eyed the chain-link fence behind him, ten feet high and topped with razor wire. He traced its gray length across the hills, a rough circle maybe sixty miles in circumference. How useful would the fence be, really, if they came? There would be thousands of them, and they’d be angry.

  How else could you expect them to feel, when they knew they were all about to die?

  —

  It had begun, five years earlier, with the Disappearances.

  Scientists and engineers.

  Just a few at first. They were not famous people, and their disappearances rarely made the news. There was enough going on in the news already, in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Everything the scientists had warned people about was happening all at once.

  The seas were rising. The oceans had died, from plankton right up the food chain. The water tables had gone toxic. Computer viruses formed networks that shut down the Internet at least once a week.

  A few vanishing eggheads didn’t seem like a big deal.

  The Disappearances caught Milo’s attention when they started happening at Stanford, where he worked. Melinda Warnstein-Keppler, the electronics guru, vanished from her apartment, leaving dinner in the microwave. Zhou Chen-Barnhart, the builder of the orbital neutrino collector, was next, then Claudine Fraas, the Nobel laureate author of Problems in Holographic Relativity.

  Milo didn’t worry about disappearing, himself. He was a research assistant. An information-science gunslinger, but he would never be a giant. He worked for the giants and was honored to do so. They were all, in their way, trying to save the world, back when they still thought it could be saved.

  Milo had come to science in a way that was both usual and unusual. Like most science-worshippers, he was curious. There was nothing he didn’t want to know, and this made him absorb books and computer links the way other kids absorbed loud music. That was the ordinary part. The extraordinary part was why he wanted so badly to understand how the world worked (and how time worked, and space, and life and death).

  He heard voices in his head.

  Not the voices of schizophrenia but voices that seemed to be from the past. Other lives he had lived. Memories spanning thousands of years. Information that came to him out of nowhere, because he had once lived in Japan or had once been an Egyptian mathematician.

  Hell, maybe he was schizophrenic. Maybe he had a brain tumor.

  (You don’t have a brain tumor, a voice told him. A fo
rmer doctor.)

  He wound up working for Wayne Aldrin, the rock star of Systems Integration Science. At twenty-five, Aldrin had published It’s Only an Island if You Look at It from the Water, a treatise that revolutionized problem solving. At thirty, he had developed a food plant that would thrive in toxic earth; it broke down poisons, cleaned the soil, and dropped fruit that was basically a big yellow multivitamin. It could have fed half the world, Milo had heard, except that it would have cost the wrong people a lot of money.

  “The trouble with problem solving,” Aldrin often complained, “is that too many people are making money off the problems.”

  Aldrin was forty now. He wore his gray mane like an ocean wave, curling backward and breaking around his neck. His surgeon’s hands were machines the way a flute is a machine. He was the sort of man da Vinci might have imagined.

  Milo considered Aldrin the greatest human alive.

  They were working, in those days, on the Nowhere Computer. It was a computer that existed only in cyberspace and worked like a vacuum: pulling in functions and data that were already “out there.” It was immeasurably powerful, according to Aldrin, for something that didn’t actually exist. When the Disappearances began, they hadn’t gotten it to work yet.

  Milo didn’t let this bother him. To be honest, his attention was elsewhere. Not on the voices but on his fellow info-cruncher, Kim. The torch he carried for her was the lab’s worst-kept secret. Someday he was going to ask her out. When he wasn’t so busy.

  One quiet Friday, Kim leaned over his desk and said, “I wonder if you could do me a favor.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I have a date,” she said, “but no babysitter. I don’t think anyone even does babysitting anymore. I wonder if you could come over and watch Libby for me.”

  She should have just shot him. All around the office, eavesdroppers winced. Ouch, ouch, ouch…

  (No way! said some of his voices.)

  Shit. Really? Fuck!

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course.” Fuck.

  “Seven?” she said.

  “Okay.”

  —

  He rang the doorbell at Kim’s ground-level apartment, and she answered wearing a long, sheer dress that left one shoulder exposed. One tanned, smooth shoulder.

  “Hey,” he said, stepping in. “You look great.”

  “Why, thanks.”

  “Hey,” he said to Libby (Kim’s six-year-old), who was parked in front of the TV. It was a good TV night, meaning the TV stations were broadcasting.

  Libby didn’t answer.

  “What time are you expecting the lucky fellow?” Milo asked. Maybe he could manage to be in the bathroom when the doorbell rang.

  “He’s here,” said Kim, opening a bottle of white wine.

  Here? Already? Shit. Where?

  “Didn’t I tell you, Milo? It’s you. I’m going on a date with you tonight. If that’s okay. It’ll just have to be here, because, like I said, the babysitter thing.”

  She blinked at him with wide, sunny eyes.

  Oh, wow!

  “I…well, of course,” he said.

  “I was getting old,” said Kim, “waiting for you to ask.”

  He felt silly for waiting and decided to balance it with an act of spontaneous courage. He slipped an arm around her waist, drew her to him, and kissed her on the lips. She returned the kiss, and they released each other.

  Libby watched them over the back of the couch.

  “Are you guys getting married?” she asked.

  (Are you guys getting married? asked some of the voices.)

  —

  They had dinner, the three of them, by candlelight. Milo found himself having a kind of double date.

  “I have one of the lab computers here at home,” Kim told him, over roast beef. “I’ve been working on the satellite problem.”

  “I hate spiders,” Libby told him.

  That’s how it went. Two conversations, two dates, at once.

  “It’s been three years,” answered Milo, “since anyone launched a new satellite. It’s going to be like a new Dark Ages if we don’t find a new way to transmit. I don’t care for spiders, either. Aren’t you glad they don’t fly?”

  “What if we teach data packets to ignore the existing systems? What if we could get info to just, I don’t know, bounce off the magnetosphere?”

  “Did you know some cockroaches can fly?”

  Milo was stunned. That was frigging brilliant. It was the kind of thing Aldrin would get excited about.

  “We should call the Doc,” he said. “I heard about flying cockroaches!” he added. “Gross!”

  “They’re called palmetto bugs. I have to go number one.”

  There was lemon meringue pie for dessert, in front of the TV. They watched an old Batman movie and fell asleep on the couch together, all three of them.

  The next morning, an hour before daycare opened, they took Libby along when they sped over to the university, hoping to catch Aldrin at his customary cafeteria table, with his tablet and his orange and his orange juice.

  But he wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t in his office, either, although his door was open. And he wasn’t in the lab. Neither was any of his stuff.

  Milo and Kim shared the same unbelieving look.

  “Disappeared,” they whispered together.

  “What’s that mean?” asked Libby.

  Before they could answer, two scary guys in black suits marched into the lab.

  “Milo Osgood?” they asked. “Kimberly Dodd and”—one of them checked a handheld tablet—“Libby?”

  Ah, shit, thought Milo.

  “Yeah,” all three of them said, and, just like that, they were disappeared, too.

  —

  First they were driven to the airport. Then they were rushed aboard a small jet and flown east. On landing, they were driven down a bunch of farm roads, through golden morning light and corn, to a white building with no windows, surrounded by military tents and military people. They were escorted inside, down a long, spotless white hallway, and left before a spotless, featureless door.

  The door opened before Milo could knock, and there stood Wayne Aldrin. He looked ruffled, if unharmed, and had a haunted look in his eye that hadn’t been there before.

  “First of all,” he said, “I’m sorry. Second of all, come in and sit down.”

  Libby was about to say something, but at that precise moment a bright-looking teenager in a jumpsuit and ponytail came hurrying up, saying, “Are you Libby?”

  Fifteen seconds later she and Libby were off, down the hall, hand in hand. “I’ll get her breakfast!” promised the teen, “and have her back to you in an hour!”

  Milo gave Kim’s waist a squeeze as Aldrin ushered them into his new office. A cheap desk, a table, coffee machine, filing cabinets, computers, and some folding chairs. Aldrin, plainly, hadn’t disappeared; he’d been transplanted.

  “It’ll be best,” said Aldrin, “if I just explain, without interruption. Then you can ask questions or yell and scream, if you want.

  “A year ago, some amateur astronomers sighted an anomaly in the night sky. The professionals took a look at it, and it’s bad news. In October of 2025, a comet the size of Ireland is going to hit the planet Earth like a big, fat musket ball and probably kill every living thing. So they—let me finish, Milo—so they had a big conference to decide what we should do, and what they decided was this: to collect the right scientists and nuts-and-bolts people and have them build spaceships to carry humanity away from Earth. One ship for Venus, one for Earth orbit, one for Mars, and one for Jupiter’s moons. The ships will serve as habitats and carry materials to build more habitats.”

  Milo had to lace his fingers together to keep his hands from shaking. Beside him, Kim softly gasped.

  “So,” Aldrin continued, “to do all this, we need to do a hundred years of science and engineering in just five years. Now, before you go asking a bazillion questions, let me see if I
can anticipate you. One: How many people can go on these big ships? The answer is: Not many. Maybe six thousand on each of the arks. Two: What are they telling the rest of the planet? The answer is: Nothing for as long as possible, or they’ll come here and rip us all to shreds. Third: Why are you here? You’re here because I’m here, and I’m allowed a staff of two. Why am I here? Because in order to make this all work without breaking down, it has to be as simple as possible. I’m here to try and make it all…”

  “Elegant,” suggested Milo. Then he threw up on the floor.

  “Exactly,” said Aldrin. “Oh, damn. I’ll call a custodian. Don’t worry. I threw up, too.”

  —

  They repaired to the hallway and kept talking while waiting for the custodian. Holding hands, Kim and Milo asked some questions that Aldrin must have anticipated but hadn’t gotten to yet.

  He listened patiently, gravely.

  “No,” he answered. “You are not guaranteed a place aboard one of the arks. Only the team leaders are guaranteed, at first. Yes, I’m one of them. No, Kim, I’m sorry, there’s no special exception for children. As we get closer to our launch date, skilled workers will be selected, as we learn more about our needs. Later, there will be a series of lotteries.”

  Kim glared a hole in the floor.

  “If you won’t guarantee Libby a seat,” she said quietly, “I will do nothing whatsoever to help you.”

  “Nor will I,” said Milo, surprising himself.

  Aldrin shook his head.

  “They’re not my rules, you guys,” he said. “That’s something you have to understand. Just because I’m a key designer doesn’t mean I have any say where policy’s concerned.”

  “Who does?” asked Milo.

  “Money,” spat Kim. “Who else? When it comes right down to it, there’s about five or six world banks that hold the loan on everything.”

  “That’s a myth,” said Milo.