Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  “Thomas? What was your life like before you came here?”

  Thomas had been busy repairing some kind of crude tool. He did not stop.

  “There is no before,” he said.

  Milo opened his mouth to press the issue, but Thomas turned his head and looked at him. It was a look of total calm and honesty, and it said that if Milo made another peep, he would kill him.

  So Milo was silent and watched a mind movie of an Easter morning some years ago, a soft pink blur in his head.

  —

  Arabeth cradled Milo’s head in her hands and tilted it back and forth, scrutinizing Seagram’s work.

  “Looks legal enough,” she told Thomas and Gob. “Who’s to say it ain’t?”

  They were meeting in the same room as before, where they’d thrown Milo into the air lock. Except it was crowded in there this time.

  Three other prisoners for the air lock.

  An old man, built like a whip, with springs wired into his legs.

  A younger man with one arm gone, covered in hair like a troll.

  A woman who could have been a man, except that she was naked, so you could tell. She had blue eyes like Arabeth’s.

  Were the bionics all Seagram’s work? What did the blue eyes do, and the springs?

  Made them faster, obviously. Made them see better, go farther, last longer.

  Milo clenched and unclenched his fists. He wanted this over with, one way or another.

  “You better win,” said Gob, squeezing his elbow, “or I will eat your face.”

  “If you don’t win,” said Thomas, “better just stay out there.”

  Milo was the only slave among the divers. The only one with owners on hand to threaten him. The others, it seemed, were volunteers. Lucky. Stupid?

  Over by the window stood five men with what looked like cameras.

  “Sportswriters,” said the man-woman, stepping up beside Milo. “Just like back in the world.”

  “I thought so,” said Milo.

  “They’re the ones who’ll flash around pictures of your dead face after I check you on the rocks.”

  “That’s great,” said Milo.

  —

  Arabeth sprayed the divers down with…what? Hot water?

  “Glow,” said the trollish diver, seeing the puzzled look on Milo’s face. “It’ll make you visible out there, so people can come see your body floating.”

  “Good luck,” Milo told him.

  The troll shook his head, and then they all climbed through the hatch.

  No preliminaries, no countdown.

  Just pppppppppsssss­sssss­sssst! Thump! And the four of them were in space.

  Milo knew he had to be aggressive. He had to be faster than—

  He wasn’t.

  Space grabbed at him and vacuumed him in all directions at once.

  Hands and feet slammed him back and down. He felt his skin tear down one side of his cheek. Raw tissue started bubbling out of the wound.

  They looked like ghosts, leaping through space, flying just above the cratered surface. Glowing nakedness in pure dark.

  Milo did the arrow thing, just like before. Off to one side, as he flew into the void, he saw the ready-room window, with the reporters staring out through their lenses.

  It didn’t take Milo long to realize his mistake.

  He had launched himself at the opposite air lock, with its light. But this race was different. He had forgotten. He was supposed to dig in and go back the way he’d come. Could he still do that? Did he have enough consciousness left?

  He saw the troll reach down and drag his fingers along the surface, slowing, and bringing his feet to bear against uneven rock. Pushing off like a swimmer, the troll reversed course back to the air lock. Seconds later, Milo could tell he was unconscious. Had he aimed well? Hard to tell.

  Milo looked around for some way to stop himself, to start back. But he had aimed too high; rocks and crevasses slipped by just out of reach.

  Well, shit.

  (Cold like a million tiny ripsaws…fizzing and boiling…swelling like dough…)

  The last thing he knew before his mind emptied was the old man shoving him aside, off course.

  Milo wondered who had won, and then————Boop. Zero. Dark.

  —

  He woke up.

  Had they come and gotten him?

  No. He was still out there. Floating across the crater. Gravity must have slowed him, finally. He could reach down and stop himself if he wished. So he did. He turned and looked back the way he’d come.

  Not too far away, he saw the reporters in the window.

  Also not far away, he saw his three competitors, floating at various speeds back toward the open air lock. The first, the man-woman, would reach it within seconds. Then the old man. The troll was off course. He was going to float off and die of exposure, Milo saw.

  Hurry, advised his voices.

  His hands, pawing at the ground, were like balloons and sausages, and he bubbled inside, like before. But his head was clearing. Why? How?

  No time.

  Milo pushed, launching himself through space, and almost instantly he was back among the other divers—too fast!

  He slowed.

  What the fuck? You can’t slow down in space!

  But he did.

  What is happening? he asked himself, asked his old-soul self, but the wise ones were just as surprised as he was.

  —

  Later, the entire viewing audience of Unferth would be surprised. And impressed. And wild to know more.

  Wherever digital screens could be viewed or wherever still pictures could be pasted on stone walls, the story of Milo’s first competitive space dive was all over Unferth.

  The videos and pictures showed Milo zooming out of nowhere, unexplainably awake and functioning, and then slowing down.

  They showed him reaching out with swollen, frozen hands, stopping the old man and the man-woman. Leaving them behind, slowly turning, softly glowing.

  The pictures showed Milo sidestepping—still conscious, mind you!—across five yards of airless space and tugging the troll back with him. Pulling himself into the air lock—clinching the win!—and then pulling all of his rivals in behind him. Then the air lock slammed closed, and that was the end of the prison news, which looped right back to the beginning.

  “Who and what is Milo Hay?” inmates were asking, all over Unferth.

  “Who is he?” asked the groups and crowds and individual cons who started crowding the passages outside Thomas’s cliff dwelling. “Where is he?”

  “He’s at the fucking hospital!” yelled Thomas, who didn’t like getting his picture taken, and threw rocks at them. “Where would you be if you spent a whole minute dicking around in outer space in your birthday suit?”

  —

  Milo was not at the hospital.

  The other divers went straight there, of course, as always, with varying degrees of damage. They survived, with the exception of the old man, who tried to hold his breath, when he should have known better, and died of a shredded lung.

  Milo, to everyone’s astonishment, had staggered out of the air lock, blinked a few bloody tears out of his remaining natural eye, and looked around for his owners.

  Gob and Thomas stood shaking their heads. They acted as if they wanted to slap Milo’s back but thought he might be fragile.

  “I don’t know what I just saw,” said Thomas.

  Arabeth said nothing. She herded the sportswriters out of the room and followed them down the hall.

  “I think I’ve earned a share,” Milo had the nerve to tell Gob.

  “You got a date with Seagram, is all,” said Gob.

  —

  So that’s where Milo was.

  Seagram’s place was a laboratory and a studio and a shop. It was like hanging out in a museum. Over here, racks of sheet-metal plates. Over there, lenses and microscopes and actual computers. Seagram even had a handmade fish that followed him around, hovering
over his shoulder. No one else in Unferth had a fish, not that Milo had seen.

  Seagram served something like wine in tin cups and cooked something like real food. It looked like chicken and tasted like pork.

  “What is this?” Milo asked. “It’s like real meat.”

  “You know what it is,” answered Seagram.

  Yeah. Milo knew. There was only one kind of animal in Unferth.

  He was hungry. Screw it. He ate.

  —

  After dinner, Milo was grudgingly pleased to discover that Seagram possessed an actual mattress (in Unferth, just like everywhere else, the money was in resources and technology). He was also relieved when Seagram turned out to be gentle, even kind. That was a first since his arrival.

  Still. All that lumpy, burned skin…

  It’s just flesh and bones, said his old soul. Let it go.

  “You’re a telepath,” said Seagram, after.

  They lay on Seagram’s mattress, side by side, watching shadows on the stone ceiling.

  “Telepath?” asked Milo.

  “Telekinetic, too, obviously. I suspected it when I wired your eye. Psychic brains are folded differently. Have you always been able to do…what you did?”

  “When I was little,” Milo said, “I could float things. But then I got in some trouble, and—”

  “They stuck a mole on you,” finished Seagram. “They’d have done the same thing before they sent you here, too, if they’d thought you had the talent. You might have gone into remission with it, but it’s back. Big-time. My wild guess is that your brain got desperate and gave your talents a jumpstart. That happens; people get in an accident or bump their heads or have an intense emotional experience, and—whammo!—they wake up able to do and see things they couldn’t before. Whether you meant to or not, you controlled your circulation to slow your oxygen consumption. Maybe even propelled yourself through space. The video doesn’t lie.”

  Seagram rolled onto his side and stroked Milo’s shoulder. Milo recoiled.

  Seagram backed off. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to,” he said.

  Milo glared at Seagram, his red eye zooming in and out.

  “I don’t want to!” he shouted. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

  Seagram looked hurt.

  “I’m sorry,” said Milo. “I’m not…I don’t like men that way.”

  Seagram rolled out of bed and wrapped a robe around his fat self.

  “It’s okay,” he said, busying himself at one of his benches. “I didn’t, either, before. But you will eventually, probably. Most do.”

  “Well, not me.”

  “That’s fine, Milo. Go to sleep.”

  It was the first time in Unferth he’d been called by his name.

  —

  The next day, Seagram gave him clothes to wear. Just a simple burlap shirt with no sleeves and short pants with a length of twine for a belt.

  “People are looking for you everywhere,” he said, after a breakfast of cold leftovers.

  “If I talked to them,” said Milo, “what would I say?”

  “I wouldn’t tell them the truth. It’ll scare them. Just go back to Thomas and let him figure out how to keep them away from the door.”

  Milo’s brow furrowed. “Go back now? I thought I was staying here for a week,” he said. “Is it because I don’t—”

  “No, no. I’ll give Thomas a good report on you; don’t worry. I just don’t feel well. It happens. I get headaches.”

  Milo didn’t want to go back to Thomas. His rectum tightened at the thought.

  “Listen,” he said. “Let me try something.”

  “Try what?” Seagram’s eyes narrowed.

  “Trust me.”

  Seagram said, “Boy, if you’re thinking of stabbing me, you should know: It’s damn hard to kill a fat man—” But then he stopped talking. Some thought or feeling seemed to catch up with him, and he said, “All right. What?”

  “Close your eyes.”

  Seagram closed his eyes, and Milo walked around the table, stepped up behind him, and put both hands on Seagram’s great, fat head.

  If he could make himself space-proof by accident, maybe he could make Seagram feel better. How? He didn’t know. He closed his own eyes.

  A “nothing” feeling, for a moment, and then something like holding an ocean between his hands. Something warm and full, with electric tides.

  Seagram’s self.

  It was a vast thing, a dreaming strangeness, a boa very much like his own, but different. Older. Deep with memories.

  Pain.

  The longer Milo held Seagram, this other self, in his hands and his mind, the more it became like a weight. Here was a soul that had been wronged and hurt until it was in danger of becoming a mere creature.

  Milo heard himself gasp aloud under it. Like his own pain, he sensed, it was something you could get lost in. He remembered that he had done this for a reason, taken hold of Seagram for a reason. He felt himself peeling back shadow and distractions and illusions, until it seemed to him that he found something that was simple and human.

  A door. A door in the dark sea bottom, where something of value had been forgotten and locked away.

  Milo opened the door and light spilled out. He felt it in his hands, saw it inside his own mind.

  Seagram jerked. He said, “Jesus on a stick!”

  It was just chemicals, Milo knew. He had moved neurochemicals around in Seagram’s head. But neurochemicals, like memories, made the man.

  Yes, Milo! cheered his old soul.

  He let go of Seagram’s head.

  Seagram sat with his mouth agape.

  “Your headache is gone?” asked Milo.

  Seagram leaped up, with impressive energy for a fat man. “What did you do?”

  “I think I made your brain work better.”

  Seagram stared around his shop as if it was all new to him.

  Something new in his eyes. Something you didn’t see in Unferth. Milo couldn’t give it a name yet.

  “My God,” he breathed. “Thank you.”

  “So, can I stay?” asked Milo. When it came to avoiding Thomas, he was very goal-oriented.

  “You can,” said Seagram. “But I think you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t hide or run from something.”

  “He can hurt me. He can kill me.”

  Seagram shook his head, nearly crying with happiness.

  He said, “Not if you do to him what you just did to me.”

  Milo couldn’t imagine trying that. He spat on the floor. But, whatever. If Seagram wanted him to go, he’d go.

  He nodded goodbye and set out through the dark stone labyrinth.

  As he went, he felt around in his own brain. Navigated his own black ocean. Groped until he found his own hidden door. Broke it open…wider and wider and wider…

  —

  Seagram lived on Level Two, many corridors and four villages away from the dwelling Milo shared with Thomas. Milo discovered that if he gave his head a little internal tap, he could sniff out the way he’d come. He actually made it back to the edge of his home city before other prisoners glimpsed his face, recognized him from video, and started following him. They grabbed at him, shouting questions.

  “What the hell did you do?” they asked. “Are you magic?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “I passed out, and then I woke up.”

  “Lying-ass punk! What do you know you ain’t telling?”

  “Nothing,” he answered.

  Someone grabbed his arm.

  Let go of me, he thought.

  And they did, for just a second, as if they’d gotten a shock or felt something slimy. But in a moment their hands were back, gripping, twisting his clothes.

  Let go! he thought, and bolted for Thomas’s house.

  He came tripping across the threshold, out of breath, and there was Thomas on the floor with some work he’d brought home with him: pipes and elbows and wrenches and things. Milo went down in a heap
against the far wall as the crowd behind him blocked the door, made it dark.

  Thomas roared to his feet, a pipe in each hand.

  Smack! A broken jaw. A howling intruder.

  The crowd dissolved.

  Thomas turned to Milo. His eyes burned.

  “You’re back early,” he said, through his teeth. “I told you, you better make him happy, or—”

  “He is happy,” Milo said, sitting up. “Listen—”

  But Thomas wasn’t listening. The crowd had pissed him off.

  “Seagram give you these?” he snarled, tugging at Milo’s clothes. He bunched his fist to tear the shirt off, and Milo grabbed his wrist.

  Thomas slapped him.

  “You lost your mind, boy?”

  Milo didn’t let go.

  He took one hell of a beating, but he gripped Thomas’s arm with everything he had. Something muscular coiled in his mind and extended to his hands. He climbed channels of light and bone, until at last he had Thomas’s self—a smaller ocean than Seagram’s—in hand.

  And he shouldered the pain and shrugged it away until he found the buried door, and the pain came flooding out.

  He opened his eyes to see Thomas vomiting in the corner.

  Milo fetched him water. Helped him drink. Cleaned up as best he could.

  At last, Thomas was quiet. And he sat in the middle of the floor and lifted his shaggy head and looked straight at Milo, and just said, “Yes.”

  —

  Gob was much more difficult.

  Thomas had to tackle him, or try to, anyhow. He distracted him long enough for Milo to daze him with a lead pipe, which distracted him long enough for Thomas to knock him out properly with a larger lead pipe. When Gob was asleep, Milo took his head in his hands and opened his door.

  It was a small house. Its innermost room didn’t contain a lot of light. Gob wasn’t going to be anybody’s self-renewal poster child.

  He also didn’t vomit and shit himself when he woke up. He just said, “Better,” and started to cry.

  —

  Freedom! Kind of.

  Milo finally got his own room, or cell. With Thomas, Seagram, and Gob, he showed up in a doorway belonging to a sad, tall man wearing nothing but a burlap turban.

  “Would you like to be happy?” Milo asked him. “Would you like to have something to live for?”