Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  Then a hundred, and then everyone. Even the children.

  Milo let them sit there like that with their hands raised. No one spoke.

  He raised his hand, too.

  “We are already dead,” he said. “Let’s make it count. Let’s create a world, a solar system, in which the following is true: If you put out your hand and try to bully people into serving you, those people will always choose not to serve. Very soon, no one will try that anymore. It would be like trying to juggle water.”

  Silence again. The hands went down.

  One hand went back up. Gilgamesh.

  “I don’t get it,” said Gilgamesh. “In the story, are we the zombie guy or the Baron guy?”

  More hands followed.

  “Are we supposed to be ready to die for real or, like, metaphorically?”

  “Is the woman in the story supposed to represent freedom? Or is it a sex thing?”

  “Does that paint itch? It looks like it itches.”

  Milo closed his eyes. He backed away, out of the firelight.

  —

  The next morning, he walked down to the beach and helped push the fishing outriggers into the surf. He wore a fresh coat of black and a fresh coat of bones.

  “Good weather!” he wished them, “And tons of fish!”

  “Thanks!” yelled Jale as they slipped away, raising sail.

  Jale had drawn a bone on one arm, he saw. Good.

  He sat down on the beach and meditated.

  He thought about spiders, for some reason. He couldn’t help it.

  The twins joined him, wearing complete skeleton paint. Carlo had six hundred arm bones and an extra eye.

  —

  The next day, he climbed up to the pump.

  He wore a special greasy variety of the skeleton paint, because someone was needed to dive down into the well and jar the drill head loose again.

  Two of the engineers had painted their faces like skulls.

  The dive he made that day was deeper than any he’d ever attempted. By the time he resurfaced, he was blue. You could see it through the paint.

  —

  The next day, he walked the forest with members of the Food-Safety Committee to taste-test a new kind of banana the soil had begun sprouting.

  Two of them, Sage and Nosferatu, wore skeleton paint. The three of them walked together, searched the trees together, and, when the committee found what they were looking for, it was the three of them who volunteered to taste a little bit.

  Just a little bit.

  Before he even got his banana peeled, Milo’s fingers blistered.

  Nosferatu had no reaction, but he dropped his banana the second he saw Milo’s fingers.

  Sage lost an eye. A tumor swelled up in her eye socket and just—pop!—burst her eye.

  But she joined them in meditating on the beach afterward.

  “I can’t do it,” she complained. “I keep thinking about my eye.”

  “Me, too,” said Milo.

  —

  The next day, the whole Food-Safety Committee wore skeleton paint. So did a lot of others. Maybe fifty. Some accessorized with dry leaves and sticks. Milo saw green skeletons, yellow skeletons, blue skeletons. No red. It was hard to make red.

  Milo was thinking about making another speech, when something awful happened.

  He and sixty other people were sitting on the beach pretending to meditate when something bristly and silver came tearing out of the sky. It raced for the island, guns flashing, and then thundered straight back into space.

  The cartel was still mad about their lost ship.

  Most of the islanders ran uphill along the coast, to see if the tsunami drum was all right.

  It was not. It was blasted in two and burning.

  So was the watcher, a little boy named Marcus.

  —

  The next day, the entire Family Stone came out in skeleton makeup.

  They were waiting outside Milo’s tent when he woke up. All of them, in a big semicircle, weaving in and out among the huts, all the way down to the beach.

  They waited in total silence. The only sound was the wind in the lovely, deadly trees and the constant sigh of the ocean.

  Finally, it was Sir St. John Fotheringay—in blue skeleton paint—who cleared his throat.

  “Was there something in particular,” he said, “that you wanted us to do?”

  “Yes,” said Milo. “Go fishing.”

  —

  They went fishing. All of them. Instead of doing their cartel work.

  It took them two weeks to build enough outriggers to carry them all. But every day they went to the forest and cut trees. Afterward, they practiced breathing. They meditated. Even if they couldn’t quiet their minds all the way, they learned to control their breath and their rhythms.

  They swam out to sea and practiced diving. Deeper and deeper every day.

  Some of them drowned.

  “Jennadots,” Jale intoned, by the fire at night. “Holly Timm, Mrs. Jones, Axelrod, and Fantasia.”

  Finally, they put out to sea. The whole Family Stone. And they stayed there for an entire week and rode the sea and ate like kings.

  —

  Milo was pretty sure they’d find the cartel waiting for them when they got back. But they didn’t.

  The cartel had been there, all right. They had burned the village to atoms.

  The Family Stone didn’t even talk about it. They sailed around the island and found a better beach. The Rebuilding Committee gathered wood and leaves for huts. The Tsunami Committee commissioned a new drum and new catamarans.

  Everyone kept busy, either preserving fish or cooking fish or building something or searching for vegetables, or teaching or learning or watching for giant waves. And they were happy doing it, more or less.

  “The blue skeleton paint itches,” Suzie complained to Milo. She had made her own blue paint out of raspberry juice, mud, and something like a lemon.

  “Don’t use it anymore,” Milo advised. He kept waiting for the stupid paint to start raising tumors and killing people. But that was his only needling concern. Other than that, things were as they should be.

  That was the status of the Family Stone when the cartel came scorching down with two heavies full of Monitors, bellowing over their loudspeakers.

  —

  Milo tried to stay busy doing his work, winding leafy fibers into thread for fishing nets, but he had a hell of a time not watching the goons out of the corner of his eye.

  They gathered in a cluster, like they always did, burp guns at their chests, obviously expecting the Family Stone to line up. They looked silly, standing in their little knot, being ignored.

  Eventually they approached the first islander in sight: Mr. Jones.

  Mr. Jones was filleting redfish and hanging the fillets to dry on a crude wooden rack. He was decked out in blue skeleton paint and scratching himself when the Monitors walked up.

  Milo couldn’t hear what was said, but he could imagine.

  “Why the hell aren’t you moon niggers lined up?” the Monitors would ask.

  “We are busy doing our work,” Mr. Jones would say, continuing to work.

  “Your work,” the Monitors would continue, “is to operate the wells and be prepared to provide water for our tankers.”

  Mr. Jones would ignore this nonsense, because it was no longer true.

  The Monitors would probably get mad and—yep, there they went, beating the living shit out of Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones, as rehearsed, wrapped his arms around his head and tried to endure. He even tried to return to his work, but they clubbed him back to the ground and left him there, bloody and motionless.

  “Dammit,” Milo whispered.

  Briefly, the Monitors split up and tried to drag a few people down to the shore. But the people they grabbed went limp and became a real pain to move.

  “How come you’re all wearing this skeleton shit?” Milo heard a Monitor ask Christopher Noonguesser, trying to pull him away from
his work.

  “We’re dead,” answered Noonguesser. “There’s nothing you can do to us.”

  The Monitor gave Noonguesser a smart kick in the teeth and left him there.

  “Dammit,” said Milo. He kept letting his thread get loose, which meant starting over. What he needed was a drop spindle. Rootabeth, the resident expert, had told him that at least three times, but he’d been too lazy to carve himself one. He would do it tonight, he decided, if they didn’t all get shot today.

  The Monitors were having a conference by their spacecraft now.

  Crackle, crackle, crackle.

  They would get on the loudspeaker and make some kind of threat, Milo knew.

  But they didn’t.

  They got back in the heavies and swooped away over the outgoing tide, up and gone.

  The Hospital Committee rushed to help Jones and Noonguesser.

  “What now?” asked Suzie.

  “Now I’m going to go find some wood for a spindle,” he said. “You?”

  “I’m going to go scrape off this fucking blue paint,” she said.

  At least eighty other islanders went with her into the woods, scratching and cursing, all silently proud and feeling brave to the point of tears.

  —

  The silent treatment could work both ways, Milo discovered.

  The next day, the goons were back. Several sleds and heavies landed. One large ship hovered over the beach, not quite landing.

  The cartel stooges who got out and walked around were engineer types, with a few Monitors. They crackled to one another by speaker and radio and said nothing at all to the Family Stone.

  The big ship opened its bay doors, and something like a giant coconut fell out.

  It did not strike the ground. It bobbed in the air as if it had reached the end of an invisible tether, and there it stayed. It had an odd look to it, as if it might or might not be glowing softly. It blurred around its edges, as if it might not quite be there.

  The ship nosed up and rode its skyhook back into space.

  The smaller craft followed, except one. A single heavy, steaming at the edge of the cliff.

  A loudspeaker spoke to the islanders as they built and cooked and fixed things.

  “We will return in one week,” said the loudspeaker. “At that time, we will expect the pump and well to be functioning and at least forty thousand kiloliters of detoxified water available for loading.”

  Then the heavy rumbled off the sand and shot into orbit.

  Christopher Noonguesser came walking up. Noonguesser wore a bandage around his jaw and had lost about half of his teeth.

  He pointed up at the coconut thing, hovering and blurring overhead.

  “That’s one of those things they’ve been testing,” he said. “It’s an inside-out bomb.”

  —

  “It’s an inside-out bomb,” Milo announced to the whole Family Stone, at around noon. It seemed only right to share what he knew.

  “Great,” said Christmas Break, still mostly blind from the first test they’d witnessed.

  A lot of islanders—maybe a hundred—got up and headed into the woods. Headed, specifically, in the direction of the pumps.

  “Aw, fuck,” said Milo. And he opened his mouth to shout, to get them to hang on and hang together, but Suzie put her arms around him and said, “Shhhhh, baby. Don’t police them. It works or it doesn’t. The dead don’t force things; they just go about their business.”

  She was right.

  Still, it made him so mad. How could people give up like that? He sat down to try meditating again (couldn’t stop thinking about whether his butt was getting bigger as he got older. Did that happen to everyone? Why?) and almost managed to get some kind of peace back.

  Suzie sat beside him, doing the same thing.

  He got up around twilight, at the very beginning of the eclipse, and was getting ready to go find wood for his damn drop spindle when Suzie pointed at the trees and said, “Milo, look.”

  He looked.

  A hundred islanders emerged from the forest in a line like a triumphant hunting party, all carrying some kind of machinery, or sheet metal, or small motors or transformers or pipework.

  Parts from the cartel’s precious pump.

  They piled them in the middle of the village, and the Rebuilding Committee got busy sorting through the parts, discussing what could be useful and how.

  Many of the islanders, Milo noticed, now wore traces of red bones on their skin.

  “How’d they manage to get red paint?” he wondered aloud.

  “Easy,” Suzie answered. “It’s blood.”

  —

  The day before the cartel had promised to return, Milo quietly put out the word for the Family Stone to gather on the beach.

  Skeleton by skeleton, committee by committee, they all came.

  Milo arrived with a package of some kind tucked under his arm—a roll of sailcloth, it looked like.

  “I brought something to show you,” he announced. And he unrolled the sailcloth to reveal ten communications fish. Black, sleek, and military-looking.

  A gasp went up. Islanders could get their faces shot off just for mentioning fish, let alone having ten of them actually in their possession.

  Milo picked up one of the fish and held it high.

  “A couple of months ago,” he told them, “Suzie and I found the missing cartel ship, and we dove down to the wreck. Suzie salvaged these from inside the cockpit, and we haven’t told you about it. I’m sorry about that. We should have told you. At the time, it seemed like we might have to keep secrets from one another.”

  The Family Stone made forgiving noises.

  “You have a plan,” shouted Carver, way in the back, “don’t you, Milo?”

  Milo put the fish down and clapped his hands two times.

  “Let me tell you about my plan,” he said.

  —

  Milo’s plan called for the cartel ships to come down and look around to see if their slaves had wised up.

  Which they did.

  Fa-zooooo­ooooo­oom! At midmorning, about fifty ships came slamming down out of space and circled all over the place. A lot of them circled more than forty miles out. Big ships, like the first time they’d tested their bomb. A few heavies landed on the beach.

  The Monitors on the beach looked around, and Milo could see them getting madder and madder as they saw tons of pump machinery helping to support huts, forming launch docks for the catamarans, forming…was that a playground?

  The soldiers boomed and crackled and waved their burp guns.

  Milo almost wished they would shoot. Noonguesser had gotten every one of the fish activated, and five of them were in the woods now, filming.

  But the goons all got back aboard their spacecraft and left the island and circled far away.

  Overhead, the inside-out bomb made some eerie noises.

  Okay, thought Milo. This was being filmed, too. Not just here but far out at sea.

  Ten miles out—that was his plan—the Fish Committee was supposed to have left their outriggers spread out and sea-anchored. They were supposed to be treading water, and five of them were supposed to be filming. Filming the fleet, filming the island, filming anything big and awful that might happen.

  But here was where Milo’s plan differed from what everyone else wanted to do.

  The Fish Committee, since his big speech, since the Parable of Jonathan Yah Yah, included nearly everyone. Milo’s plan was for nearly everyone to leave the island aboard the outriggers, film whatever happened to the island, and broadcast it in one military-priority burst, reaching everywhere from Venus to the Neptune ammonia mines. Then they were to survive. To dive and swim if they had to, avoiding the fleet, and going on to live their lives.

  That morning, however, the Fish Committee had told him no.

  “No,” said Jale, whose hair had gone white since Chili’s murder. “Are we dead or aren’t we?”

  “We are,” they all said, the whole
Family Stone.

  In the end, it was mostly the children who took the outriggers out. They could work the fish as well as grown-ups and hit SEND when the time came. They could sail and dive and swim and had a lot of years to look forward to, if things changed.

  If people under the cartel thumb, from Venus to the Neptune ammonia mines, heard the Parable of Jonathan Yah Yah and learned about being dead.

  “Because they’re the Family Stone, too,” Carver said as they formed a circle. “We refused to accept the cartel rules; it’s why we’re here. But we’re not the only ones. There’re others like us everywhere, and they’ll know what to do when they see what happens on this island. When they see this thing of beauty the cartel has built for them.”

  Christopher Noonguesser was with the children, out there hiding among the waves. So was Old Deuteronomy. If they survived, they would help explain what had gone on here.

  Most of them, though, stood right here under the bomb.

  They pretended not to be watching it.

  Most of them pretended not to be afraid.

  “Milo?” said Fotheringay. “I’m afraid.”

  “I was trying to meditate,” said a man named Wild Bill. “But I keep thinking about that fucking bomb.”

  “Me, too,” said a lot of people.

  Milo noticed the bomb getting bright around the edges.

  “I’ve always sucked at meditating,” Milo said. “Sometimes I can’t think of anything but cats.”

  “I always have to go to the bathroom,” said Calypso.

  “I think about not thinking about things,” said Yoko Jones. “I can’t help it.”

  “I think about getting old,” said Suzie.

  “Food,” said someone else.

  “The alphabet.”

  “Making love.”

  “My missing eye.”

  “My kids back on Ganymede.”

  “Music.”

  After that, they didn’t talk anymore. The moment was simply too busy, too heavy.

  Now? Now?

  Would it hurt? Would they burn like stars or just end suddenly?

  Now?

  If you were Sir St. John Fotheringay, you began doing a little dance at this point. If you were Yoko Jones, you tried to hum in perfect sync with the Everything.

  If you were Milo, at that point, you decided that these last moments were the perfect time to finally meditate for real, and you looked straight into Suzie’s eyes and your eyes locked and you meditated together.