Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  “Mak lo,” answered Carlo, with his mouth full.

  “Muk luk,” said Milo, and they just looked at him.

  After dinner, Milo took Dad down to Frog’s.

  By the time they got there, a couple of other people were waiting in the hall. One by one they buzzed in and buzzed out and scurried away. By the time Milo buzzed in, seven people had shown up all at once, fidgety and coughing.

  “Something’s going around,” Milo said to Frog.

  “I’m shutting down for the night,” answered Frog, sweating over his pill cutter. “They’re going to get me pinched. ’Zup?”

  “My mom. This same cough everyone’s getting.”

  Frog handed over a zip bag with five lozenges.

  Out in the corridor, it was getting noisy. More people. More coughing.

  “That’s a schedule-one antibiotic,” said Frog. “Gimme sixteen. That’s friend prices. Then out you go.”

  Dad handed over the chits.

  When Milo opened the door, the latch sprang in his hand, and he fell back under the sudden weight of three big coughing pipe fitters.

  “I got nothing!” he heard Frog shouting, panicking. “I’m just a dishwasher, swear to God!”

  In the corridor, heavy boots. Monitors!

  Dad grasped Milo’s elbow. Together, they got to their feet and hunkered down, pushing for the door.

  They broke free and stumbled into the corridor.

  But the corridor was worse. Full of coughing people, too many to count, and Monitors among them, smashing skulls. Milo heard the howl of an anaconda around the corner.

  Everywhere, fists and elbows.

  The zip bag got loose.

  “Retards!” Milo gasped, clawing after the bag.

  “No time,” grunted Dad, pulling at him.

  A Monitor grabbed him by the collar, pulling the other way.

  “Your SPLAT has been scanned!” roared the amplified voice. “Now, up against the wall!”

  The anaconda appeared—a massive vacuum hose, wrangled by Monitors in exo-frames, sucking up screaming rioters. They flew away down its cavelike throat (to where?).

  The thing turned toward Milo. The slipstream pulled at him.

  Dad, gritting his teeth, grabbed for something, anything.

  Suddenly there was this girl.

  She interposed, all flying black hair and waving arms and crazy eyes.

  “No!” she screamed at the wranglers. “They’re with me! Undercover 6065650!”

  She waved some kind of plastic badge in the air.

  The vacuum pulled the girl off her feet. The anaconda swallowed Milo and Dad, too—

  —almost. The wranglers shut it down. Louvers slammed across the great mouth. Dad fell, and the wranglers kicked him to his feet.

  “Follow me!” barked the girl, darting around, then running down the hall.

  They followed, bewildered, as fast as they could.

  —

  The girl led them straight up to the commercial ring just as the shift whistle blew. The whole concourse trembled as the twilight shift came off, passing the grave shift going on. Boots thumped, voices growled. Toolbelts clanged.

  The girl shook long dark hair over her face and gave Milo a look he couldn’t interpret.

  “What you told them,” said Milo, “about the undercover—”

  “They scanned us,” whispered Dad urgently. “They have our SPLAT codes.”

  “Listen,” said the girl, flashing the plastic badge. “It’s not mine. It’s from an enforcement volunteer in our hall who died in one of the abandoned seed cages. I’m not a snitch. I help make food.”

  “The kitchens.” Milo couldn’t help a tone of disgust.

  “Not the kitchens,” said the girl, rolling her eyes. “I said ‘food.’ Medicine isn’t the only thing you can buy under the table, you know. You guys have never been pinched before, have you?”

  They gave her identical dumb looks.

  “By now they’ve scanned a thousand codes. Way more than they can process. If they didn’t get you with the anaconda, you’re clear.”

  In the corridors behind them, noise and shouting. The Monitors in Frog’s corridor had obviously failed to contain the chaos.

  “It’s turning into a real thing,” said Dad.

  Milo grasped the girl’s elbow and asked, “Why did you help us?”

  There was that unreadable look again. It was the only answer she gave.

  Rioters spilled into the concourse.

  “You dropped this!” said the girl, pressing something into Milo’s hand.

  Mom’s pills.

  Then she was gone, slipping away downstream.

  —

  Dad kept them close the next day. Even the twins had to follow him around in the tubes and tunnels.

  “Rioters’ll break into the pods on the skilled level,” he explained. “For food.”

  Dad gave the twins his fish and let them read important numbers to him.

  From the corridors below, the smell of smoke.

  “They’re burning the unrefined fuel,” said Mom.

  “Idiots,” sneered Dad. “They’ll use up the air. Don’t they realize?”

  That’s when the Monitors showed up. Five of them.

  “Ventilation one one zero one zero zero one zero one?” the commander barked, his speaker cranked way up.

  “That’s me,” answered Dad.

  “Shut down the lung,” said the commander.

  Dad’s whole body jerked, as if he’d gotten a mild shock.

  Mom started to say something, but a sudden cough silenced her.

  “That’ll kill the oxygen,” said Dad.

  The commander leveled his burp gun.

  The twins watched in silence. They understood that something important was happening.

  Mom closed her eyes, trembling.

  “No,” said Dad.

  And he looked straight into their masks as they shot him.

  His whole chest came apart. He fell, gagging, and died.

  Milo’s jaw dropped. Before he could move or say anything, a handful of rioters spilled onto the gantry.

  The Monitors’ burp guns sprayed green gas.

  Milo felt his body go numb. He dropped to the floor for what seemed like a year.

  —

  He woke up underwater.

  His eyes opened, and he saw sunlight and waves overhead. Felt himself immersed and sinking. He kicked and swam and broke onto the surface, gasping, treading water that stretched everywhere, as far as he could see.

  Above, a flying machine whined and rumbled, then shrieked away.

  He’d been dumped in the water—the ocean? Was this an ocean?

  Shouting and panic, all around. Fifteen people, he guessed, struggled in the water.

  Jupiter split the sky like a crescent knife. Other crescents—other moons—hung in space to either side. (It was a lot to take in for a kid who’d never been outside, never been anyplace bigger than the lung. If it hadn’t been for sims, he might have panicked and definitely would have drowned.)

  (Are we downplanet? Is this Europa?)

  “Mom!” he cried out.

  Fwoom! A giant orange fish exploded from the sea and fell toward them, fell on top of them—

  A raft! It inflated, grew rigid, and sat turning in the water like a floating fort.

  There was Mom. There were the twins, already clambering over the side.

  Giggling. Pushing each other.

  Milo crawled over to his mother, and her eyes brightened. She grasped the back of his head and brought their foreheads together. They sat like that without a word.

  The twins, meanwhile, gamboled in the middle of the raft.

  “Whootoi!” yelped Carlo.

  “Nok beta,” answered Serene.

  Then they turned to Milo, turned to Mom, and together said, “Dad.”

  There was nothing to do but shake their heads. Milo felt his mother trembling.

  The twins fell silent, holding han
ds.

  —

  “Land,” someone said.

  What? Milo wasn’t sure what to look for. Except in movies and sims, he’d never seen a horizon before.

  Something like a dark wall, way ahead. Cliffsides rising above the waves.

  The island seemed to race toward them.

  “Tidal currents,” coughed Mom. “We might get carried right past.”

  Milo gave her a curious look. She and Dad had lived in other places, off-crawler. They had something called “education.”

  “Europa practically sits in Jupiter’s lap,” Mom explained, “in an elliptical orbit. So it’s got huge tides that squeeze it like a rubber ball.”

  The island loomed close. At the top, jungle trees and vines bristled and hung. At the waterline, the ocean hissed and swirled, exploding on sharp rock.

  “Ho!” someone yelled.

  People and boats surrounded them, darting between waves. Dark, naked people. Long, skinny boats, like things made from scraps, with ragged curving sails. The dark people threw cables over the raft. Passengers grabbed for these lifelines.

  “Hold tight!” bellowed the dark people. Some of them, Milo noticed, had breasts.

  He grabbed a cable—like nothing he’d ever touched before, rough and unfamiliar—and gripped tight. The raft slowed.

  The water did things he couldn’t understand. It seemed to be rising, swallowing the island whole. The water climbed and climbed. Was the island sinking?

  “Tides,” repeated Mom. “Hundreds of feet high.”

  The twins clung to her arms and to each other.

  They rode the rising tide like that, with their mysterious saviors grinning all around them and the sea racing by.

  The sea reached the top of the cliff, and there it stopped.

  It crashed against a long white beach.

  It lifted the boats and the raft and let them scrape gently onto land, where the dark people leaped out and helped the newcomers onto dry sand and grass.

  Beyond the grass, houses of the same materials that formed the boats and the cables.

  Wood, Milo realized, remembering his classes and sims. Vines and trees. Wonderful!

  Beyond the little houses, a great crowd of green and wood and vines—a forest!—which rose up the flanks of steep hills.

  More islanders came running from the village. All dark, like their rescuers, and all naked.

  “Thank you,” said Mom, her voice raw.

  The strangers nodded.

  “You’re the third package in two days,” said one of the strangers, a man with long gray hair and a missing eye. “What in the star-spangled hell is going on up there?”

  —

  The man’s name was Boone, and he didn’t waste a lot of time on chitchat. He introduced himself, shook some hands, and then called out, “Where’s Jale?”

  “Here, Boone,” answered one of the rescuers, sitting in the grass.

  One of the rescuers with breasts, Milo noticed. His own age, maybe a little younger.

  “We need you to go back out again.”

  “Aw, dammit, Boone, we just—”

  “We’re out of redfish. O-U-T out.”

  They glared at each other, the girl and the one-eyed man. Then the girl stood and waved her arms up and down.

  “Fish Committee!” she shouted. “Pony, make sure freshwater bags are aboard, and Chili Pepper, baby, check the nets, will ya?”

  The dark, naked people who had rescued them—nearly all kids and teens, Milo now realized—popped up and ran in various directions, grabbing this and that. Most of them converged on the skinny wooden boats they’d just arrived in, yelling back and forth. Singing, some of them.

  Jale—the leader of this wild young navy—took three long steps across the sand and stood looking down at Milo.

  “Come fishing,” she said.

  “I…we just got here,” he stammered.

  “You’ve seen about all there is to see,” said Jale, shrugging. “It ain’t complicated.”

  “He’ll go,” said another voice, behind him. Another girl.

  Squinting against the sun, Milo looked back over his shoulder, and there was the girl from the crawler, from the night the riots began. And she was naked.

  Milo produced a croaking noise.

  “Go!” called his mother, not far away, one twin in each arm, surrounded by islanders.

  Then they had him by the arms, the two girls and a variety of children, and he was aboard a wooden outrigger. Twenty or so island kids splashed alongside, pushing the boat into the surf. The girl from the crawler ran with them, laughing. Then they all vaulted into the waist with him, balancing expertly.

  Jale clambered up to the prow and crouched there, tugging ropes, freeing a sail, which snapped open like a wing.

  The ocean and the wind whipped them away from the island.

  The girl from the crawler sat facing him. Looking at him. She seemed amused.

  She’s beautiful, Milo thought. He struggled to focus on her eyes, because she was so, so naked.

  “I’m Suzie,” she said.

  —

  Two other outriggers sailed alongside them, and the three boats were out for three days.

  Three clock-days, in crawler time. Earth days. In Jupiter orbit, that was one day. Eighty-odd hours from one dim sunrise to the next.

  Milo had time, finally, to think about his father. If he stared into the sun long enough, he could project Dad’s face onto the cloud bands of Jupiter. He was wary of tears, though. The people around him had losses of their own. He would handle his loss alone, for now.

  I shouldn’t have left the twins so soon, he thought. Or Mom.

  The islanders leaped around and over Milo and Suzie, pulling ropes, loosing nets. The nets came back with fish in them, and the islanders would sing out and pack them away in a hole up front, covered in palm fronds. Or they would make evil faces and empty the nets back into the sea. Milo glimpsed one fish with a mouth in its belly. Another had tumors for eyes, writhing with tiny pink tentacles.

  Suzie, Milo learned, had been a victim of the anaconda, sucked up and jailed less than an hour after rescuing Milo. Like him, she had no memory of being transported downplanet. She had been here for four days. This was her second fishing trip.

  “It’s beautiful here,” she said, “but it’s toxic. The terraformers’ big learning experience. They need fish—like, lots of fish, especially redfish—for the antioxidants.”

  “What’s an antioxidant?”

  “I don’t know. We have a lot to learn. Like how to sail and how to walk around on this stupid boat without falling in the water, and how come you still have your clothes on? It’s warm. It’s always warm.”

  Because I have an erection, Milo thought.

  When in Rome, said a voice inside him.

  Seized by a sudden and particular courage, Milo half-stood, worked his way out of his clothes, and cast them overboard.

  Suzie eyed his erection.

  “Is that because of me?” she asked.

  Milo nodded.

  “Wow,” she said. Then she stood and climbed up to the prow with Jale and asked if someone could please teach her how to work the nets.

  —

  They learned the nets, and the sails, and how to read the weather.

  They learned the islanders’ names. Among the younger kids were Zardoz, High Voltage, and Demon Rum. The teens were Gilgamesh, Talk Pretty, Frodo, Pony, and Chili Pepper, Jale’s boyfriend. Jale was the captain; they deferred to her on all three boats.

  The sky went through changes. Jupiter changed shape. The distant sun crept between horizons. Smaller moons passed. Dark clouds boiled up sometimes, and they sailed around these when they could.

  “You watch the water, too,” Jale told them. “Not just the sky.”

  “For fish?” asked Suzie.

  “Fish and tsunami,” answered Jale, eyes on the sea. “The tides here make everything bigger.”

  When they slept, they left a fe
w kids to mind the sails and watch the sea. The crews curled up in the bottom, jumbled together in knots, while Jupiter eclipsed the sun and haunted the sky like a hole with a glowing rim, and the stars came out, and the other moons shined brighter than ever.

  Milo and Suzie didn’t sleep. Not then.

  They slumped together with the outrigger’s wooden hull on one side and a pile of sleeping kids on the other. Their bare arms and shoulders touching sent shivers all over Milo.

  “You talk to yourself,” Suzie whispered.

  “Hmmm?”

  “You heard me. What’s going on when you do that?”

  What was he going to say?

  “Sometimes my head talks to me,” he said.

  “Mine, too,” she said, and they went back to being silent and not sleeping.

  —

  “Redfish!” Chili Pepper called out in the middle of the second day.

  The crews boiled into action, tying sails down.

  “What about the nets?” asked Suzie.

  “Don’t use nets for redfish,” said Zardoz.“You gots to dive for ’em.”

  Milo searched the water. All he saw was a school of tiny, iridescent guppies darting around. Leaping and splashing on the surface.

  “Dive for what?” he asked. “There’s nothing here big enough to eat. Just these—”

  “Rainbow minnies,” said Suzie. “The redfish come up from under and feed on them. Where you see minnies, there’s redfish.”

  “Get your air!” yelled Jale.

  All the older kids, the teens, started hyperventilating.

  “They have to fill their tissues with oxygen,” Suzie explained.

  “Jesus,” said Milo. “How deep are the redfish?”

  “Deep,” answered Demon Rum.

  Milo looked thoughtful for a second. Then he started inhaling and exhaling as fast as he could.

  “No, Milo,” said Suzie.

  “Working in the lung,” Milo said, speaking on the exhale, “with my dad…we’d get gas bleed-off…from the waste membranes…the cartel gas masks didn’t work for shit…so we’d have to hold our breath…couple minutes at a time…I can swim…no reason I can’t…dive and fish…”

  Demon Rum handed out short wooden spears to the older kids.

  “Milo,” said Suzie, “listen, you don’t—”

  “I’m going,” he said, feeling light-headed.

  “Jale!” shouted Suzie.

  “Let him,” said Jale.