There were no janitors. You had to clean up after yourself or force others to do it. This kept people from being too messy.
When Milo had been Thomas’s “girl” for a week or so, he found to his horror that Thomas could loan him out.
Thomas needed a new tool. So he took Milo to spend the night at the home of Gob the Blacksmith.
“You will not like Gob,” Thomas told Milo, on the way to Gob’s shop.
They had to go through a heavily populated zone of the prison, a place that had been developed for shops and industry, where larger, better-maintained plumbing was available and power was more reliable. It was essentially a cave the size of a village. Phosphorescent lanterns hung from mossy cables. Stacked along the walls like Anasazi cliff dwellings were commercial spaces and residential cells. There were rude streets and passageways, packed with shoving, smelly, bad-tempered foot traffic.
Gob was a giant, Milo discovered when they got to the blacksmith shop. Milo couldn’t stop looking at him.
He had been born a giant, but then things had been done to him. One whole side of his cranium had been sculpted from an aluminum plate. His arms and shoulders looked as if a muscle bomb had gone off. Then levers and springs and other machinery had been worked into his flesh and bones. When they first arrived in his shop, he was tearing a piece of sheet metal with his bare semi-robotic hands.
“Are you shitting me?” Milo exclaimed.
“He has to be strong,” Thomas explained. “He can’t use heat, because fire uses air. So he can only pound and tear and cut and squeeze.”
Gob began rolling the sheet metal into a tube. As he worked, he cast a red eye on Milo.
“He’s pretty,” said Gob.
“It’s a loan,” Thomas said. “You understand? Two nights. One thread cutter.”
Gob understood.
To Milo, Thomas said, “You stay here for now,” and was gone.
Gob reached across the shop, plucked Milo off his feet, and slapped manacles around his ankles.
“You don’t need those,” Milo whined. He had no plans to run. Where would he go?
“Be quiet,” grumbled Gob. Casually, he reached down with a pair of crude, twisted scissors and snipped off a bit of Milo’s left ear. It bounced off his knee and lay on the floor amid iron shavings. Milo’s stunned brain could only think how dirty it looked and wonder if the rest of him was that dirty.
His asthma rose up and overwhelmed him.
—
In his two days at Gob’s forge, Milo watched the giant whittle metal as if it were wood. Watched him bleed, sometimes, when his muscles and machinery tore through overtaxed skin.
Sometimes Gob asked him to fetch things, and Milo fetched. Sometimes Gob had other uses for him. Milo tried to force himself to sleep when that happened. Breathe in, breathe out, be someplace else. In this way, he found, he could keep his asthma at bay.
The second morning, a round, heavily scarred man came in and cut thin strips of skin from his legs, for which Gob paid him. Gob ate one of these and offered Milo another. Milo refused.
“Obey,” rumbled Gob. “You eat when you can.”
Gob threatened him with the scissors. Milo refused.
Roaring, Gob made a noose and hung him from an iron peg high on the wall.
“No!” Milo cried, before his airway collapsed. He kicked and swung, feeling his vertebrae stretch, feeling nothing, and then dark.
—
Gob laid him down on the floor. Milo’s neck and lungs burned. He wanted to vomit, but his throat wouldn’t work right.
Gob straightened and glared down at him like an evil god.
—
When Thomas came back, he wasn’t happy with his new tool.
“It won’t cut straight,” he muttered, turning it over in his hands. “The threads will stick.”
Gob made a dark, inquisitive noise. The noise seemed to make Thomas nervous.
“No,” he said. “I can make it work.”
Turning to Milo, Thomas said, “Let’s go. I’ve got something to show you. Something you’ll like.” He actually seemed excited and almost happy. Weird. What could he have to show that he would think Milo might like?
But Gob reached out with those great, half-robotic arms and grabbed them each by one shoulder.
“The boy,” said Gob. “Let’s talk about the boy.”
“You can’t have him,” answered Thomas, though he didn’t seem too sure of himself.
Gob shook his head. “Not that,” he said. “I tried to hang him.”
Thomas’s eyes flared, but he also inched toward the door. “Goddammit, Gob! You promised me—”
“It didn’t work,” said Gob.
“Well, good,” said Thomas, through his teeth.
“Think about that,” said Gob. “Stop trying to walk out the door. Think about it until you see what that means.”
—
“What it means,” Thomas told Milo, when they finally left the blacksmith’s shop, “is that we can get rich. As rich as you can get in here, anyway.”
Milo had listened to the two big prisoners talk, and all he had gotten out of it was that he, Milo, was going to be “trained.”
They shoved their way through the crowded streets. Thomas was in a hurry, still excited about something. He wouldn’t say what.
“Trained to do what?” Milo wanted to know.
“Tested first,” said Thomas. “Then trained, if you pass. You’ll see tomorrow. Right now, look! We’re here.”
Thomas had led them up into the cliff dwellings and stopped before an open doorway on the second level.
“Where’s here?” asked Milo.
“Home. A new home.”
“How?” Milo asked. “Is it expensive? I don’t get it.”
Thomas shrugged. “I wanted it,” he said.
They stepped inside, and there was the explanation. A naked man lay crumpled against the far wall, neck twisted, head smashed open. The floor was a dead sea of drying blood. Milo could taste the tang of iron on the air. He shook and then threw up.
“I took it,” said Thomas.
The room was bigger than their grave hole, Milo noted. Maybe four times as big.
“You decide about dinner,” Thomas said, laying a heavy arm around Milo’s shoulders. “I can go out and get…you know, food…or we can…you know.”
He indicated the dead man.
Milo threw up again.
“We call it ‘long pig.’ ”
And again.
—
“It’s called ‘diving,’ ” Thomas explained.
They were on their way up-tunnel, toward the surface. Toward the test Thomas had hinted at.
“Diving?”
“Do yourself a favor,” said Thomas. “Breathe in and out as deep and fast as you can.”
“Why?”
“Do it!” Thomas shouted.
So Milo began hyperventilating. They turned a corner and started up a steep ramp.
“Stop when you feel faint,” advised Thomas.
Milo started feeling faint just as the tunnel opened up into a chamber roughly the size of their new dwelling back in the village.
One whole wall was a window, overlooking a rugged crater. Beside the window, a door, and near the door, an old woman who looked like a wizard. Long white hair and blue eyes. Not just blue irises—both eyes were completely blue. Was she blind?
He stumbled and would have passed out on the floor if the woman hadn’t caught him.
“Been hyperventilating, have you?” she asked.
“He told me to,” gasped Milo, jerking his head at Thomas.
“Good. I’m Arabeth. As soon as your head clears, we’ll go.”
Milo’s head cleared rapidly. His thoughts and vision came back into focus.
“Does he know…?” Arabeth asked Thomas.
“Not a thing.”
“Good. Less likely to panic if he doesn’t have time to think about it. Now, boy, listen to me. Look and
listen.”
“All right,” said Milo.
She slapped a big metal knob in the middle of the door. The door, which looked as if it had been hammered together out of old steel buckets, hissed and popped open. Beyond, a rusted air lock.
“We’re going to space you, boy,” she said. “What you need to do—”
Milo howled, backing away, but Thomas caught him and held him.
“When that outer hatch opens, you’ll have about ten seconds to get to the next hatch, about twenty feet that way”—she pointed—“before you go dark.”
Thomas hurled him into the air lock. Milo tried to claw his way back, but they were shutting the hatch.
“Hey!” he screamed.
Pppppppppssssssssst! Thump! He heard the hatch seal.
He sprayed urine, flinging himself against the hammered metal.
Then—psssssssst!—the glowstrips in the air lock went out, and the air went out, and the outer hatch opened, and he saw stars up above and total dark below…
At the same time, a violent feeling as if he were blowing up like a balloon…
Air jetting up his throat and out through his lips, his chest like a pancake…
Cold that burned, a volcano of cold all over…
He was in space, naked.
Raw, wild panic—
If you panic, said his old, wise voices, you will die. Quickly—do what the old woman told you.
Milo straightened his mind like an arrow and aimed it at the problem.
He pushed with his toes and caught with his fingers at the hatch—it burned! Everything burned all over, like sticking your tongue on a lamppost in a cold snap.
Something awful was happening to his eyes. They were getting foggy, fast!
The other hatch…He looked where he’d been told, and there it was. How far away?
(Swelling all over, like rising bread. Inside, he fizzed like soda pop…)
Gripping the edges of the hatch, he pulled with his arms and pushed with his legs and shot himself through the dark, toward that light.
His eyes blurred. He was almost blind.
No sense of movement. Nothing.
(Except an agony of swelling, volcanic cold, fizzing————————————————————)
—
Unbelievably, he woke up.
How could he still be alive? He wasn’t too happy about it, frankly.
First he became aware of pain. As if he’d been sunburned inside and out.
He still couldn’t see.
Voices came to him, as if from the bottom of a tin can.
“You probably feel sunburned,” said a female voice. The woman with the blue eyes.
“You look like shit,” said another voice. Thomas.
“You’re not sunburned,” said the woman. “There’s no star nearby, so you don’t have to worry about radiation. Now, what is my name?”
“Arabeth,” Milo grunted.
“Good, good. You did exactly the right thing,” said the woman. “Got yourself moving in the right direction, and your unconscious ass just sailed right into the open air lock. You’re not always going to be so lucky. Best work on staying awake.”
What? They wanted him to do this again?
His vision came back, a little at a time. Two vague forms squatted over him.
“Hardly anyone passes the test,” the woman told him. “Lucky boy. You’re going to be an athlete. For a little while, anyhow, until you die.”
—
They didn’t have much in the way of entertainment on Unferth, Thomas explained, back at their tiny home. They had fights, of course, and competitions to see who could swallow the most of such and such a chemical. But diving was the only true spectator sport.
It was basically a race. You put three or four naked people in an air lock and opened the door. They scrambled out, and the object was to be the one who went farthest before turning around and coming back. The winner was the one who went the greatest distance and made it back to the air lock alive.
“Almost every time,” said Thomas, while shitting into a bucket, “there’s at least one that doesn’t come back. They pass out and tumble away, or they start bleeding inside, or their eyes go out on them and they get lost and miss the hatch coming back.”
“I didn’t know you could put a person out in pure space,” said Milo, “without a spacesuit. I thought they’d get killed instantly.”
“People are tough,” said Thomas, wiping himself with a handful of burlap. “They can take just about anything for a little while.”
Prisoners, he explained, liked to place bets on the divers, with whatever they had to offer. Cloth. Labor. Food. Muscle. The divers themselves sometimes made money.
“What made you think I could do it?” Milo asked.
“Gob tried to hang you, and you lived. Your body knows how to hold on to oxygen, and your mind knows how to not panic. That woman, the one with the blue eyes? Arabeth? She’s the most famous space diver ever. She got rich enough to quit. Now she gets paid to run the games.”
“How rich do I have to get,” Milo asked, “before I don’t have to do it anymore?”
Thomas laughed.
“You’re not going to get rich at all,” he said, handing Milo a bowl of protein sludge.
“What do you mean? What do you mean I’m not going to get—”
“You belong to Gob and me. If you win, we get a cut. You get to live.”
Milo’s eyes stung. He flung his bowl across the room.
“I’m not your fucking slave!” he screamed.
Thomas struck like a snake. His fists cracked Milo’s head. In an instant, his full weight squatted on Milo’s chest.
“Yes, you are,” said Thomas. “Of course you are.”
Just to make his point, Thomas stayed there for at least twenty minutes. Long enough for Milo to have an asthma attack and pass out.
—
When he awoke the following morning, Milo’s first thought was that Thomas had stayed on top of him all night long, had fallen asleep, and was still there. He opened his eyes and tried to sit up but couldn’t.
“Thomas,” he wheezed. “You’ve got to let me up, let me breathe—”
But Thomas was behind him.
“Shut up,” he said, and cuffed Milo’s ear.
A great Halloween mask of a head, half metal, leaned over and peered down at him.
Gob.
And another face. A fat face, bald, with burn grafts and a metal skull patch, like Gob’s.
“This is Seagram,” rasped Gob. “He’s here to improve our investment.”
“Good morning, Milo,” said Seagram. “Do you know what this is?”
He held out something like a metal oyster, with a red ball in the middle of it and a tail made of braided copper wire.
Milo didn’t answer.
Seagram started to explain something, but Gob interrupted.
“It’s a bionic eye,” he said. “Give you a few more seconds of vision in space. Give you an edge.”
“Now, wait—” Milo gasped.
“We should at least get him drunk,” rumbled Thomas.
“Just get it done,” said Gob.
Oh, God! No way—
It happened fast. Someone pried his right eyelid wide. Someone dumped home-brewed alcohol all over his face, and everything became a stinging blur.
Something like a fishhook stabbed his eye, yanked, and Milo felt his eyeball pop free.
He screamed, and Thomas pushed his jaw shut.
A knife scraped out his empty socket, way up inside his head.
Milo tried to make himself pass out, but no dice. He felt every slice and stab and insult as they worked wires into his brain. Lights flashed and fires raged and he heard a French horn, far away. Then they screwed the eye itself, the metal oyster, into his socket.
A red blur, a high-pitched whining, and there was Seagram’s fat, burned face in front of him. Reddish, but in good focus.
“Zoo
m in,” said Seagram.
The eye seemed to know what to do. Milo simply tried to look closer at the guy, and the image magnified. Blurred, focused.
Blurred again.
“Close your good eye when you do that,” said Gob.
“We done?” asked Seagram.
“We done,” answered Gob, releasing Milo.
Seagram stood over them, rubbing his jaw.
“He looks like he might win a few,” he said. “Instead of straight payment, can we talk shares?”
“No,” said Gob. “Straight barter.”
Barter?
“After the dive tomorrow,” Thomas told Milo, helping him sit up, “you’re going home with Seagram for a week. And he better tell me you were nice to him.”
Milo blinked. His new eye whizzed, zooming in on the floor.
Dive tomorrow?
—
He had tried, since his imprisonment, not to think about his other life, before.
He was completely unsuccessful. No matter how hard he tried to shape his intellect, to shut useless thoughts and memories away, they swam at him in dreams and walked his mind like ghosts when he was awake.
Some of it was just daydreams, thoughts of young friends and summer days on the sculpted college yards. Books. Dinner with his parents. This or that girl. Music that drifted in his mental ear as clearly as the real thing.
Mostly he missed his mother, but he found himself crying, unexpectedly, for his father. At the end of things, in the courts, the old dark lord had been unmade, revealed for the first time as a small man like any other, with a heart that could break. More than anything, Milo wanted to know this new father.
At first, Milo fought against such thoughts. They were an impediment to him, in this dark arena. Especially thoughts of Ally, which made him angry and led him into self-pity like a bottomless cave. Self-pity made him weak and small; he could feel it. Remembering Ally was something he could not afford.
He could afford only that which aided his survival. Memories and wishes were deadly illusions.
The old voices agreed that his memories were dangerous. But, they said, memories are not like other illusions. Memories shape our humanity.
Milo eventually came to agree with this. He would not let Unferth reduce him. He would not be an animal, with nothing but animal thoughts.
The night after he received his mechanical eye, everything was so quiet and calm that Milo even ventured to speak to Thomas the way one human speaks to another.
Reincarnation Blues Page 14
