Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  “No, she’s right,” said Aldrin. “Money’s no different from anything else. It forms systems along paths of least resistance and collects in places. Those places, the banks, are the only ones with the muscle to pull off what we’re trying to do here.”

  “What, then,” said Milo, “we don’t cooperate, they come and put a bullet in us?”

  “I don’t know,” said Aldrin, eyes darkening. “Just don’t make trouble. Play the game, and try to improve your hand. In the meantime, let’s do our best.”

  The custodian arrived with his rolling tool closet and vanished with a nod into the office.

  “We’re in a whole new reality,” Aldrin said, placing a firm hand on each of their shoulders. “Take some time to get your brain around it. I got you guys an apartment together. Go sit. Get something to eat. They’ll bring you clothes.”

  “Together?” asked Milo. “How did you know? I mean, we just…last night was—”

  “Jesus, you guys,” Aldrin laughed. “Everybody knew, except you. Now get outta here.”

  Aldrin’s door shut behind them. Way down the hall, Libby and her babysitter came galloping their way, laughing.

  “I knew,” said Kim, burying her head in Milo’s shoulder.

  —

  The world outside of central Iowa continued to fall apart.

  A dirty bomb turned Seattle into a ghost town. The pharmaceutical industry finally hit a tipping point and overcharged itself out of existence. All over the world, people who needed medicine to stay alive began to sicken and die.

  Milo stopped getting his asthma meds. Now, when he had an attack, he toughed it out.

  The ARK compound developed into a small city. A city no one knew about and no one was allowed to fly over.

  In the largest buildings, they designed the gigantic arkships themselves. This was partly Aldrin’s domain. Within a week, they had begun brainstorming spaceships based on living creatures. Their systems would breathe like lungs, flow like blood, see and hear and think like brains.

  In other buildings, they studied ways for people—whole communities!—to live and work in space. One of the first things they decided was that people would be happier with fewer social restrictions. The need to restart the human race would make conventional marriage impractical. Human culture aboard the ships, it appeared, was going to be very “free.”

  These experiments and conclusions had a heavy influence on the current ARK culture. ARK became like a party school that was really, really, really hard to get into.

  In their dormitory, Milo and Kim lived in much the same way other families lived. They made friends. They celebrated holidays. During the day, Libby went to daycare, and Milo and Kim worked in the spacecraft-assembly building.

  They were invited to parties. They usually went.

  They were invited to join Free Love cohorts and politely declined. Milo and Kim had decided to be monogamous.

  It was not a bad life, if you were able to ignore the fact that the world outside was doomed and you were probably doomed right along with it.

  —

  Milo found himself fighting depression. Not the full-on, soul-crushing kind that could paralyze you, but an abiding and sublime sadness that seemed to well up from across the ages.

  It was the voices again. They had all lived lives on Earth, supposedly, in every age of human history. And now that part of history was going to end. Violently and badly.

  There was a Fauvist painter who feared the death of Earth far more than he had his own death, of pneumonia. There was a deeply religious farm girl from a thousand years ago who didn’t mind her own death, because the world and God’s works would endure. But now even that was in danger.

  Most of the voices were silent. That’s what depressed Milo—the silence. Eight thousand years of silent voices in his head, looking out through his eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” Kim asked him one night, catching him woolgathering by the apartment’s one window.

  “I hear voices,” he told her bluntly, at last. “Usually, anyway.”

  “No shit,” she said, taking his arm. “You talk about them in your sleep.”

  —

  A year passed.

  Within the perimeter, the spaceships themselves began to take shape. Mighty frames, at first, like cages the size of city blocks, swarming with workers, prodded by cranes. There were four. The Looking Glass, an experimental ship, would be finished first and would tour the solar system in the greatest sea trial of all time before the others—the Avalon, the Atlantis, and the Summerland—left Earth just ahead of the comet.

  Outside, the economy evaporated.

  “It’s dying fast out there,” Aldrin remarked. “And I don’t get it. Everything that’s happening was preventable. The whole last sixty years has been like watching our business leaders drive us all toward a brick wall without ever trying to turn or swerve.”

  They were in the computer lab. They were almost always in the lab these days. The ships’ giant chemical lungs weren’t cycling properly yet. Milo and Kim were pouring all their work hours into a computer model that Aldrin swore would root out the cause.

  If it worked, they’d celebrate.

  There was a lot of celebrating at ARK, because there were breakthroughs every day. It could rain Nobel Prizes at the ARK compound, and there still wouldn’t be enough recognition to go around. There wasn’t time.

  The computer model worked beautifully. Food plants growing in the ventilator bronchia were reproducing too fast. They’d have to be spread out. Maybe some of them could be grown in the coolant chambers, where there’d be condensation.

  They celebrated. Their achievement shared the news that night with a team that had discovered how to make radiation shielding out of cardboard and peanut oil.

  After a while, tiring of the crowds and the bars, Milo, Kim, and Aldrin found their way to a wide-open space far from the compound, in the middle of open grass, under stars like an ocean of ice and fire.

  They signed out a portable fire pit, and brought marshmallows, and sat in the middle of the Iowa night, drinking wine.

  Then Aldrin said, “I miss my wife.”

  What?

  “Did you know I was married?” he asked. “It was a long time ago. She died quite suddenly.”

  “I knew,” said Kim. She gave his arm a squeeze.

  “It’s not that I would wish her back now, with things the way they are. It’s only my way of observing that this project takes being alone and kind of shoves it right in your face. I mean, being a social species is what this is all about, right? Keeping the chain going. We’re not like hamsters. Hamsters live alone. Know that? They don’t even like other hamsters. We’re more like wolves. When wolves are apart, and then they come back together, they jump around and lick each other and go all crazy. They call it ‘the Jubilation of Wolves.’ ”

  Something in the fire popped, sending sparks into the night.

  “It’s not an easy time,” said Aldrin, “to be a lone wolf.”

  He put a hand on Kim’s knee and gave it a squeeze.

  Oh, man! thought Milo. What was happening here?

  Kim’s mouth wobbled open. She said, “I think I’ve had enough wine,” and stood.

  The hand dropped away. Aldrin focused on the fire.

  “I think we all have,” said Milo. He gathered up his jacket. He draped Kim’s shawl over her shoulders.

  “I’m going to stay out awhile longer,” said Aldrin, so they said their good-nights and left him there.

  When they’d gone about three hundred yards, they heard a long, broken howl.

  “Drunk, horny bastard,” muttered Milo.

  Kim took his arm and said, “Be nice.” Nice? Milo thought about the word.

  His depression had turned to raw frustration now. All their work on integration, on building a ship that worked like an organism, had become so promising. And now the great man himself was proving too human. Not only that, but his sense of appropriateness seemed to ha
ve slipped.

  Fuck.

  Might have known it would get complicated, Milo thought.

  Problems are complicated, said the Egyptian mathematician in his head. That’s what makes them problems.

  —

  The night of the first lottery, they prepared Libby’s favorite supper—mac and cheese, extra cheesy, with sliced-up hot dogs in it—and watched Libby’s favorite movie, Beverly Hills Chihuahua 47. After the child fell asleep, they practically devoured each other in their tiny sleep pod.

  Their message to each other was simple and unmistakable: They were a family and they loved one another.

  They were not chosen.

  “Libby, Libby, Libby,” Milo heard Kim whispering over her home laptop, after midnight, as the last numbers flashed. “At least Libby, Libby, Libby, Libby, Libby,” like a magic spell that wasn’t magic enough.

  —

  The Looking Glass took its final shape, and you’d think they had built some kind of cathedral out there on the Iowa plain. She lay across the hills like a trick of the eye, out of scale and shining.

  Watching her leave the Earth was like watching a whale made of fire.

  Earth and air both shook, and the whale rose—slowly, at first, still reflecting the green hills and green corn, and as it lifted away, it was like watching the Earth lift away from itself. Then the great engine bells ignited, and she crossed the sky like a second sun.

  The weather changed on the hills and blew their hair and their lab jackets and clippings from the freshly mown grass, and they all squinted, the three hundred thousand ninety-two of them that remained, as the ship shot across the sky, and up, and out.

  And they all went back to work, and the countdown resumed, a little faster.

  —

  Finally, some amateur astronomers in Mexico noticed the comet. They were calling it Comet Marie. Other people outside the fence, in different parts of the world, started putting two and two together.

  “Maybe this is why all those scientists disappeared,” they said.

  So a few of the ARK staff were assigned to get on the Internet and spread disinformation. There was, they said, a place in the Andes Mountains of Peru where you weren’t allowed to go and weren’t allowed to fly over. But here were some fuzzy satellite pictures of what looked like a tent city for thousands of people and several giant rockets under construction.

  People swarmed into South America, storming the Andes in search of survival. They were hindered by the fact that it was getting damn hard to get around out there. Luxuries like passenger flight had crashed with the world economy. Ocean travel was expensive and dangerous and mostly under pirate control. Everywhere, law was breaking down.

  Up in Iowa, they worked in peace for a while longer.

  —

  Months passed.

  The ships took their final shapes. Their anatomical systems were tested, and the ships breathed and their hearts pumped and their brains crackled and their engines flexed.

  Everywhere around ARK, work quickened and peaked. People worked harder, hit the bars harder, loved harder. They watched the clock and the skies, anticipating the reappearance of the Looking Glass and the exodus that would follow.

  For the first time, many of the ARK staffers seemed to understand that their lives weren’t going to go on for much longer. They hit the bars, but they were quiet about it. Some of them began disappearing over the fence at night. Some of them wanted to see friends or family before the world died. Some of them meant to survive and wanted time to prepare.

  Milo and Kim didn’t talk about it. Kim refused. On the outside, she clung to a prim belief that chance or justice would intercede and at least deliver her kid. On the inside, Milo could tell, she was coming apart. Instead of talking about it, they drank. They didn’t hit the bars; they just drank. For a while they supplanted talk with lovemaking. And then the lovemaking grew sad, and slowed, and stopped, almost with a shrug. Then Libby began spending nights in their bed, between them.

  The world had already ended, thought Milo. You could see it on people’s faces; they had a stretched-out, jittery look to them now, as if something had bitten them and they didn’t know what. You started coming around corners and finding people crying, and they’d look ashamed and hurry away.

  Milo didn’t cry. But he started having asthma attacks that were so bad they knocked him out. He told no one.

  In his head—or in his soul, wherever that was—certain voices chimed in, trying to be helpful. A fisherman on Krakatoa who had seen the end of the world already, in a volcanic blast heard round the world. An eight-year-old who had seen the plague approach her village, take her family, and then crawl down her own throat. A banker who took too many risks, leaping from the roof of the Grain Exchange.

  It’s ended before, they said. Who would suppose it shouldn’t end again?

  This cheered Milo up a little, believe it or not.

  —

  Most nations dissolved into chaos and rioting. The Internet gasped, flashed, and went silent.

  Milo walked into the lab one morning to find Kim and Aldrin in the midst of a heated argument. Both were red-faced and turned away from each other the moment they glimpsed him.

  “What did I miss?” Milo asked.

  “Nothing import—” Aldrin began.

  “What did I miss?” Milo roared, kicking over the nearest chair. “I’d appreciate it if one of the two of you would have the courtesy to not treat me like an idiot.”

  “He,” said Kim, her voice shaking, pointing a finger at Aldrin, “says he’ll make a place on the Summerland for us, if we’ll make him…”

  She couldn’t continue.

  “Make him what?” asked Milo.

  “Part of your family,” said Aldrin. He was trying to be dignified, with his hands folded behind his back.

  “ ‘Part of your family’?” said Milo, advancing. “Sounds like pig Latin for ‘I want to fuck your wife.’ ”

  (This, piped up the Egyptian mathematician, is yet another way the world ends.)

  “It’s not that simple,” said Aldrin, “or that coarse.”

  They were nose-to-nose.

  Kim stepped up beside them, looking worried. She’d never seen Milo hit anyone, but he sure looked ready to now, and that wouldn’t help anything. They didn’t tolerate violent people at ARK.

  Something quite complicated was happening in Milo’s mental wilderness just then. A strange inner voice was shouting at him, almost as if thousands of previous lives were trying to give him advice. Behind his anger, his soul was trying to be wise.

  The thousand voices convinced Milo to be silent and thoughtful for a minute.

  When he spoke, this is what Milo said:

  “Wayne, we love you. And with the crazy future coming down on us, your suggestion even makes some sense. But I have a problem with something. Why didn’t you come to both of us with this…proposal, if you will? But more so, how can we possibly get around the fact that it sounds like you’re trying to use Libby, and your influence, to get Kim into your bed? That doesn’t sound like you. It’s not the Wayne Aldrin I know. Why don’t you answer those questions, and then I’ll decide whether to break your teeth with a wrench.”

  Aldrin nodded.

  “Thank you for asking,” he said. “In your way, you’ve been patient. The answer to the really important question is: I haven’t changed in that way. I am not trying to get you to prostitute yourselves or to hold Libby hostage.”

  “Then what could you possibly mean?” asked Kim.

  “They have announced a change,” said Aldrin. “Only to the preselected team leaders. For whatever reason, the policy wonks have decided to give extra chances to our immediate families. I think things are getting a bit shaky. They need to make sure the teams stay cohesive and keep working, so they’re throwing the team leaders a bone.”

  Milo’s asthma launched an attack.

  “Go on,” he wheezed.

  “Well, that’s it. I’m not trying
to get in bed with your wife. I’m trying to get your family aboard an ark.”

  Milo could swear he read Kim’s mind at that moment. One thought, one priority: Libby, Libby, Libby, Libby, Libby…

  God, he didn’t want to do this.

  They were his family, goddammit.

  “We’ll do it?” he said, looking at Kim.

  Kim practically burst with relief. Rivers of tears.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Then they all just backed away, awkward, awkward, awkward, and did computer stuff and didn’t look at one another until lunchtime, when the three of them went to a notary office over in admin and got married by what was essentially a vending machine.

  —

  The comet appeared in the night sky.

  “So beautiful,” you could hear people say. They crowded the hills around the arks at night. Every night, on blankets, as if waiting for fireworks. Couples, here and there. Larger groups, whole teams of spouses.

  Milo, Kim, and Libby moved into Aldrin’s pod. It was more spacious, better appointed. “He has a dishwasher!” cried Libby, who obviously felt that this, above all, signaled some kind of evolution for their family.

  Milo and Kim spent nights in Aldrin’s sleep chamber. Aldrin himself had the grace to sleep on the couch. They progressed through an uncomfortable cycle: At first, they didn’t make love in Aldrin’s bed, any more than they made love in their own. Then something desperate and wordless got ahold of them, and they made love three nights in a row. Then they didn’t again. Kim actually shivered when Milo touched her.

  “What’s the matter?” Milo whispered. “Afraid your husband will hear?”

  “What’s the matter?” whispered Kim the first time Milo wouldn’t put out. “Afraid your husband will hear?”

  Libby spent days playing with the dishwasher, rolling the little cart in and out. She looked at Aldrin like some kind of tall, friendly dog they had come to live with.

  They explained nothing to her, out of sheer cowardice.

  —

  The second lottery began at nine in the morning, the same day that administration reported contact with the returning Looking Glass.

  All was well. The ship had flown like a silver swallow.

  The separate lottery for the leaders’ families offered an 80 percent chance. By nightfall, they knew Libby had drawn a seat. Kim went into the bathroom and cried. Not softly, but braying like a donkey.