Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  Now she looked at him.

  “I’ve been kissed,” he almost said. Boys and girls in middle school did their share of kissing. But he absorbed the insult. The moment was like a boat you didn’t dare rock.

  She lowered herself into the bottom and came to him and lowered herself over him, smelling like the river. And she pressed her lips against his, and he pressed back. At first he thought that was all she meant to do, and he was happy with it. Then something new happened. A new lip introduced itself, and he realized this was her tongue.

  While they kissed, he was generally aware that her hand was busy between them, below their collarbones. But he was lost and mindless and didn’t think about it until she pulled away and sat up, straddling him, and he saw she had unbuttoned her shirt and unsnapped her bra.

  Lord Byron would touch her.

  He reached up with both hands, letting his knuckles stroke her belly. (Don’t go grabbing for them all at once, voices advised.)

  He felt her own hands at his belt buckle then, and his heart raced. She would feel, see how hard he was. Was that good? Would she be offended?

  Standing suddenly, nearly upsetting the boat, Ally reached up under her skirt and pulled her panties down. Stepped out of them and straddled Milo. She worked her way down around him and he was inside her.

  My God! His entire mind and body whizzed and sparked.

  Immediately, orgasm approached like a surging, drooling beast. In that time, he was both frightened and astonished by Ally Shepard, who bucked with her hips and had a look in her eyes that, honestly, he didn’t like very much. As if she were striking out at someone.

  And then everything was topsy-turvy, with a scream and a laugh, and he was underwater, in all that murk, with water up his nose and his pants around his knees. Ally had jerked them over sideways, capsizing them.

  The moat was shallow. He found the bottom and stood, sputtering. Fumbling with his belt.

  “Dammit, Ally!” he croaked.

  She was sputtering, too, and still laughing. She had recovered quickly and was onshore, shoes in one hand, turtle in the other. Shirt and bra still open.

  “At least you’ve got that much,” she said, “if you die in your sleep tonight.” And she walked off into the woods, toward campus.

  He loved her and hated her.

  The gondola floated, half sunk, on the dark water. He dragged it ashore, dumped it out, and rowed home.

  He felt kind of like Lord Byron and kind of like Little Boy Blue.

  He was, for the moment, a happily confused young man.

  —

  Dinner at his parents’ house was a stilted affair.

  “You seem preoccupied,” said his father, glowering over the roast beef.

  “Oh?” said Milo. “No. Not really.”

  “Well, where are you?” asked his mother, laughing. “You’re not here. I think it’s a girl.”

  Milo’s stomach lurched.

  “There is something,” he said, “but it’s not a girl. It’s about the clubs.”

  His father chewed ponderously, frowning.

  “You’ve already taken on more than you should, for your age,” he said. “Extras can wait until next year, I should think.”

  Dammit, thought Milo, Dad knew you got invited only once. You either got on board freshman year or you didn’t get on at all. Before he could phrase this in a way calculated not to piss his father off, though, the doorbell rang.

  Maybe it was Ally Shepard. It would be just like her, he thought, to surprise him and make him uncomfortable.

  It wasn’t Ally. It was two Christminster policemen.

  “Milo Hay? Are you Milo Hay?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re under arrest,” they said, and grabbed him and spun him around and put handcuffs on him.

  “Milo?” called his mother from the other room. “Who is it?”

  “Jesus Christ!” cried Milo. “For what?”

  “Rape, Mr. Hay. This way, please.”

  —

  While he was sitting downtown in a jail cell, Milo’s ancient-soul voices tried to comfort him. The forms your life takes are illusions, said the voices. Happiness or jail—it’s transitory, like a dream.

  “The truth will out,” said his father, when they let him see visitors and an attorney.

  Milo died over and over again, describing what had happened in the boat, in the moat. His father listened like a great stone owl, arms folded across his chest. But when Milo finished, his father did something unexpected.

  He reached out with one great hand and cupped the side of Milo’s head with something like affection.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “Stupid, but not wrong. Don’t let them convince you otherwise.”

  Milo nodded.

  The attorney, a young man with a ridiculous pouf of bleach-blond hair at the very top of his head, shuffled some papers and said, “Fortunately, stupid isn’t a crime. If you’re innocent, you’re innocent. Open and shut.”

  —

  It didn’t matter that he was innocent.

  He thought about that on his way to the prison colony at Unferth, chained to a bunk in the belly of a warp transport. Three days with nothing to do but feel how unfair it all was and to be terrified.

  What mattered, it turned out, was that Ally Shepard’s dad was a rich Spartan banker and could hire a whole team of Ivy League lawyers. Professor Hay’s powers, on the other hand, were confined to his classroom. His worldly salary covered only the expense of the single pouf-haired lawyer, who took one look at the opposing team and was almost sick on the courtroom floor.

  Ally Shepard, said the opposition, had been seen by a hundred people, walking across the King’s College campus soaking wet, in what might have been a ripped-open shirt.

  “Mr. Hay’s student record,” argued the Ivy Leaguers, “is that of a precocious and impressively developed mind, accompanied by an equally developed ego. He believes himself to be a superior sort of fellow in every respect, Your Honor, and he treats his peers as mere prey. Given his sophistication, he is no more a child, sir, than you are. He is an adult and should be sentenced as such.”

  The pouf-haired attorney, to his credit, tried to say something about Ally Shepard and a long string of therapists, but the Ivy Leaguers had complicated reasons why this evidence should be disallowed.

  Professor and Mrs. Hay sat in the front row, looking ashen and small.

  “Unferth Prison,” pronounced the judge.

  —

  Falling through hyperspace, Milo reviewed his transformation.

  My exquisite life as the Lord Byron of Bridger’s Planet, he thought, is over. Which bites, because it was going to be a pretty fine life.

  His stomach gave a violent wrench, and he fought back tears.

  Now I need to figure out how to stay alive in prison. That is my grim new truth.

  Nonsense, insisted his deep soul. This is the truth: stars, time, Being, Nothingness. Your boa.

  Okay, thought Milo, desperate for anything other than despair. He would let the truth flow around him like an ocean, where the waves moved through the water but the water itself was still. He would be like the water, like the still, black moat where that lying, pathological bitch had dumped him—

  Milo, said his deep soul.

  I will be like the water, he thought, starting over.

  —

  The Unferth prison colony, he had learned online, was one of the most fearsome examples of spacefaring justice. Almost fourteen hundred years ago, when humans first left Earth and began living aboard ships and stations and other artificial environments, the problem of life support had become the guiding light for everything, including law. Down on Earth, they could afford to be warm and fuzzy and lenient. Violent criminals were freed to hurt people time after time. Greedy corporate moguls hoarded wealth and squandered resources under the protection of puppet governments. Everyone knew where that had gotten Earth, didn’t they? The moguls herded whole popu
lations into debt slavery. Violent criminals made whole communities unfit to live in. Information and education were channeled so poorly that the planet lost its ability to look ahead, to think ahead, to plan. And so they drowned in their own polluted, shortsighted muck until Comet Marie put them out of their misery. All but a very few, spared and cultivated by the worst of the moguls.

  Living in space had changed everything. On Earth, environments and communities had been vast, incomprehensible things. In space, the environment became something you could measure by looking at a gauge. The health of a community was something you could measure by glancing around a cafeteria. Air and water didn’t just come from the sky and the wind; they had to be processed, recycled, and monitored. Machines couldn’t just be ignored or argued about until they fell apart; you had to maintain them with knowledge and skill, or the monster hostilities of outer space would tear them apart and kill you. Quickly. Vacuum and gravity and radiation didn’t care about your beliefs or superstitions; the boa of outer space was strict and unforgiving. What mattered was what you did and how well and fast you could do it.

  The elements of life support became, in a sense, as valuable as life itself. There was no room for bullshit and waste. If you were going to use oxygen and water, you had to be useful. There was no more room for people who killed, raped, hit, cheated, stole, bullied, or otherwise did harm. The wealthy criminals—those who manipulated the resources for profit—lasted longer than their poorer brethren, but the boa caught up with them, too, before long.

  In the earliest days, right after the comet, harmful people were “spaced.” Authorities dragged them into an air lock and opened the outside door.

  The result? Things got shipshape in a hurry.

  When the OZ drive came along and opened up star travel, artificial environments gave way to planetary communities again. The reins of justice eased somewhat. Criminals weren’t necessarily executed. Room was found for them in out-of-the-way places, and they stayed there. Felons rarely came home.

  Unferth was one of those out-of-the-way places. It was an asteroid, hauled into deep space, light-years from anything. The surface was a barren, cratered dead zone. The outer hatches led down into a warren of tunnels, and that was where the prisoners lived their lives. They could open air locks to eject waste, including their dead. But they rarely did. Nothing was provided from outside, so the population was under pressure to follow extreme recycling protocols. The inmates found a use for everything.

  So it was thought, anyway. News didn’t really go in and out much.

  “It’s an oubliette,” his father had said, by way of description, when they said their goodbyes. “A place of forgetting.”

  It was his way of acknowledging that they’d never see each other again.

  The professor wasn’t a dark lord anymore. He was a sack of clothes, tailored on a budget. A man who’d had all his illusions kicked out of him.

  No one can live like that, thought Milo, crying, watching his parents shuffle away. Life in prison could take many forms.

  —

  Three days away from Bridger’s Planet, the cruiser dropped out of hyperspace at Unferth. A guard escorted Milo to an air lock.

  Click! Clack! Boom!

  A hissing of pressure and air.

  The opposite hatch opened, and Milo found himself peering through into a kind of bare, rusty cube. A stale smell filled the shuttle.

  Milo stepped through.

  “Bye, kiddo,” called the guard. “Mind your cornhole.”

  The hatch spun shut.

  Click! Clack! Boom!

  The cruiser warped away, leaving Milo in the rusty prison air lock, waiting.

  —

  He waited for five hours.

  Finally there was a lot of clanking and the inner hatch scraped open.

  A skinny old man greeted him, wearing burlap trousers, sandals, and a set of enormous homemade eyeglasses.

  “Heh!” barked the old man. “Got one in the hole. You coming?”

  Milo ducked through the hatch and entered the prison.

  “Shut it behind you,” said the old man, coughing, and shuffled away into…dark.

  “Hey!” yelled Milo. “Hey, um—” But the old man moved on, out of sight.

  The court had warned him not to expect a welcome or any form of processing. His fish and its biocompatible wet-wiring had been stripped from him. He had not been assigned a number, and no record-keeping would follow him into the prison.

  So where did he go? What did he do? He would need food and a place to sleep at some point. How did a prisoner procure these things? The courts had made it clear that this would be his problem.

  The corridor was not, Milo found as his eyes adjusted, entirely dark. A set of softly glowing squares high on the wall provided enough illumination for him to discern roughly carved rock walls.

  Down the corridor he went, feeling his way. About twenty feet along, the lights behind him dimmed into black, and another set came on just ahead.

  It made sense, Milo thought. Conservation. There would be no combustible light sources, because they burned oxygen. Probably the lights operated on primitive motion sensors and a phosphorescent glow mix. It made him feel better, for a minute, knowing that the prison population was capable of such sense and subtlety. Maybe he wouldn’t encounter raw brutality here, after all.

  A hundred yards down, shadows jumped out of the black, knocked him unconscious, stripped him naked, and left him bleeding on the floor.

  —

  When he woke up, he reviewed what had happened.

  The prison was a resource-poor environment. It made sense that inmates would haunt the corridors near hatches, in case of a drop-off. He’d have to anticipate traps like that.

  Atta boy! said his voices. Keep using your head….

  Milo got to his feet and soldiered on. At least he didn’t have anything else they could take.

  The voices didn’t comment on that.

  —

  An hour later, he encountered people. Real, discernible people, not just shadows and shapes. The hall opened up into a space about as big as an average living room, where several men and a couple of women sat playing a game with handmade cards. In the far corner, one man held a homemade-looking ladder for another man, who appeared to be doing something mechanical to a nest of pipes.

  They all wore some form of burlap trousers, at least. Milo felt awfully, awfully naked.

  He was hoping that this would be the point where someone would take him under a wing and talk to him and tell him things until he could learn—

  A wise man, advised his ancient soul, isn’t afraid to ask questions.

  “Can someone please help me?” Milo asked, and that’s as far as he got before three of the card players—two men and one of the women—jumped up, slammed him to the ground (“Look how pretty!”), and took turns with him until he lost consciousness.

  —

  Milo woke up with foggy senses and a body that felt bruised and crusty. He was crumpled up on cold, damp stone. He tried to make himself go back to sleep, but someone kicked him and said, “Get up. Clean yourself.”

  Milo didn’t want to be awake. He wanted to retreat inside himself. At the edge of his mind, he felt something like a pit, something dark and gibbering. The pit was something like madness, something he could disappear into.

  No, insisted the voices. You’re going to remain human. Sit up, open your eyes, and survive the day.

  So Milo sat up, feeling like a car wreck. He blinked his eyes clear and found he was sitting in a kind of hollowed-out hole, as if someone had dug a grave in the stone. There was a carpet of sorts, made of burlap and covering half of the tiny floor, and some bowls scattered about. A deck of cards. Some dark sticks that may have been charcoal or crude pencils. Something shiny and knifelike. The hole smelled like sewage.

  Directly in front of him, so close that their knees touched, sat a heavy, round man with thick, long hair and a matching beard. His eyes, in the m
iddle of all that hair, were like icy little points. Like Milo, he was naked.

  “Clean yourself,” the man repeated, thrusting a moldy burlap rag at Milo and pointing to a bowl of murky water.

  Milo wiped himself all over. Some of the grit and blood came loose; the rest he smeared around.

  Some basic communication was in order, Milo reasoned.

  “I’m Milo,” he said.

  The man pointed to himself, saying, “Thomas.” Then he said, “Eat this,” and handed Milo a bowl full of something like camel sperm.

  He couldn’t do it.

  “Not now,” he said.

  “You eat whenever you get a chance,” said Thomas.

  Milo ate. He tried not to think about what he might be putting in his mouth.

  Go along, for now, he thought. Then, later, revenge.

  No, said his old soul. Be the ocean, be the pond—

  Revenge, Milo repeated, swallowing hard.

  —

  Sooner or later, the nightmare sense of it had to go away, right? Sooner or later, Unferth would begin to seem real, and he would become less sensitive to its horror. Right?

  No. But Milo learned important things. He sensed that paying attention and learning were the keys.

  Milo learned that he had asthma. Between the dark and moldy damp and the unrelenting fear, he began to feel, at times, as if his own body were suffocating itself. Lovely, he thought, wheezing.

  He learned that he “belonged” to Thomas. Thomas branded Milo’s shoulder: Thomas 817-GG. This was the number, in the prison’s homemade system, that described the location of Thomas’s cell. He didn’t keep Milo by his side all the time or on a leash, but if Milo wandered too far away, it was pretty likely that someone would return him and collect a reward.

  Thomas was a plumber. Sometimes he left for hours or days, taking a bag of homemade tools with him. Everything in Unferth was homemade. There were people whose job it was to make things. There were people whose job it was to grow food, make clothes, make paper, glass, brew alcohol, take messages to people. There was even a sort of school system, where people shared their skills and their stories.