WATER CARTEL SKYHOOK, EARTH ORBIT, A.D. 2115
He had been born fantastically rich, which was a chance to score big soul points. If you could survive early exposure to money and privilege and avoid turning into an asshole, the universe tended to be impressed. A hundred lives ago, Milo thought this kind of challenge was just what he needed.
He had been born aboard a gleaming space yacht (past and future were much the same, as far as the universe was concerned), heir to the chair of the Interplanetary Water Resource Cartel, the company in control of all the water in the solar system. From Mercury all the way out to the Neptune ammonia mines, if you wanted water, you paid the cartel. You paid whatever the cartel told you to pay.
He grew up aboard a private space station—Mother called it a “villa”—in orbit around the comet-smashed Earth. The villa supported a population of butlers, valets, cartel lackeys, and technical crew. From time to time, new structures were added. As a toddler, Milo requested a TerraBubble big enough to sustain his own private forest. As a young teen, he demanded harem chambers.
Normal people, living in poorer quarters elsewhere in the solar system, were fascinated with Milo the way people in previous centuries were fascinated with movie stars. They ate it up when he behaved badly (on his fourteenth birthday, Milo shot his valet with an antique pistol, then had him resurrected by medical robots) and took a weirdly personal pride when he behaved nobly (like the time he donated the Black Sea to a little refugee girl who was thirsty).
Like many children of privilege, Milo found that his primary difficulty lay in fighting boredom.
He traveled around and fed his libido. By the time he was twenty, he had been to every brothel and nightspot from low Venus orbit to the nautilus caves of Titan. He tasted everything there was to taste, felt every sensation, and satisfied every urge on the human menu.
He fed his mind, attending fancy schools, earning degrees in Game Theory, Leisure Theory, and Theory Theory.
Like a lot of rich people, Milo collected things. He had a collection of antique automobiles, a collection of deadly snakes, a gallery of paintings executed by cats, and a ball of string bigger than the Great Pyramid, parked in orbit around Mars.
His collections bored him. His travels bored him.
He was sitting around one day, thinking about shooting his leg off with a particle blaster just to see if the robots could put it back on, when an item on the news feed caught his attention.
It was a short film about Kennedy Pritzker Helleconia Gates, a daughter of the Helleconia Oxygen Cartel. Like Milo, she was rich and attractive. Unlike Milo, she was not young. At two hundred and ten, thanks to cosmetic nanobots, Kennedy looked a reasonably attractive thirty.
“Bully for her,” muttered Milo.
Now, reported the article, in her most recent surgical eccentricity, Ms. Gates had ordered her virginity restored.
Milo sat up straight. He played this part of the article several times.
“You can’t really do that,” he said, consulting cartel scientists. “Can you?”
They explained to him that, yes, it could be done, in a physiological sense. The bored look in Milo’s eyes gave way to a lively fire.
A fire of purpose, even zeal.
He would seduce Kennedy Pritzker Helleconia Gates and collect her famous virginity.
He arranged for them both to be ribbon-cutters for the new Martian supercolosseum.
“I liked what you did with the Black Sea,” Kennedy said, shaking his hand in the green room before the event. “You’re never boring when you make the news.”
“Nor you,” replied Milo. Plunging straight ahead, he said, “After the ribbon-cutting, will you join me for dinner in my shuttle? I’ll cook for you. I make, as it happens, a terrific zero-g étouffée.”
She turned him down with the faintest shadow of a laugh.
Later, alone in his shuttle with a bag of potato chips, Milo reflected. He saw Kennedy for what she was: a life that had aged like whiskey, growing mellow and deep. He saw himself as she must see him: a haughty child, a vacuum of character.
He couldn’t win her.
Not the usual way, anyhow.
It came to him in a dream.
Past midnight, disheveled in his silk dragon robe, Milo summoned the cartel engineers and announced his plan to overwhelm the pants off Kennedy Gates.
“I will host the mightiest charitable ball in the history of humankind,” he told them. “There will be music by famous musicians, food by famous chefs, dances, narcotics, and erotics, hosted in a palace of my own design.”
“Fine,” they all said. “Where?”
“On the sun,” said Milo. “You will build me a palace on the sun.”
When a cartel chairman—or her son—tells you to build something, you build it.
So they built Milo his palace. Put it together in Earth orbit, explaining that when the time came, it could rocket to the sun and be lowered to the surface. A thing called the “Yesterday Field” made it possible. The palace would be protected by an invisible lattice of exotic particles. The lattice would send the sun’s heat back through time—to yesterday, as it were—leaving the palace unburned.
“The only problem…” said the scientists.
But Milo was too excited to listen further. He jumped up and down, dancing, ignoring them.
“It’s important,” they said, but he had his headphones on.
The construction of the Water Cartel Sun Palace took three years. It became the most popular media item on the SolWide stream, with millions checking their newsgroups hourly to watch the fantastic turrets and spires take shape above the ruined Earth.
Milo concerned himself with one thing only during those three years, and he got that one thing. Kennedy Gates RSVP’d in the positive, on singing stationery, just twenty-four hours before launch. “I’ll be there,” she wrote, “one way or another.”
The guests shuttled up to the completed palace the next day and entered a grand hall vast enough to have its own weather. Milo appeared on a balcony of polished obsidian, wearing a Nehru jacket and sunglasses. At his signal, engines blazed, the Yesterday Field shimmered, and they shot toward the sun in perfect style.
Milo surveyed the throng from his balcony.
Kennedy? He didn’t see her. Fuck.
He had to leave the great hall to find her, but find her he did, drinking alone in the grand alabaster stables among the mighty Lipizzaner horsebots, feeding them apples from a leather shoulder bag. She wore a yellow sundress.
“The closest thing I’ll ever have to children,” said Milo, nodding at the horsebots. “May I?”
She handed him an apple. He fed it to his favorite, a mare named Elsie, who was programmed to tap-dance.
“I should think,” said Kennedy, “you could have all the children you liked, without having to go to a lot of trouble.”
“I think I like trouble,” he answered. “Besides, I’m picky. I can’t have them mothered by just anyone. They have to make up for my own poor genes.”
Kennedy gave him a playful look.
“False modesty doesn’t suit you,” she said. “But I like that you try.” She tossed her head to indicate the palace, all around. “I like the way you try.”
She stepped up close to him then and touched his lips with an apple. He took it with his teeth and stood there holding it as if he were a boar’s head at a feast.
“Sometimes,” she said, “a woman just appreciates a little effort.”
With that, she brushed aside her shoulder strings so that her sundress began to fall open. It seemed almost to bloom around her shoulders. Then she stood on tiptoe and bit down on the opposite side of the apple.
It was a perfect moment. The palace fired its retros just then and nestled into the surface of the sun.
Immediately, it began to melt.
A distant roar at first, and a trembling throughout.
Uh-oh. It occurred to Milo, for the first time, to wonder why all of the engineers had declined to attend the ball.
Solar fire came pouring back through time, through the Yesterday Field. All the heat and plasma and raw radiation from tomorrow—from five seconds from now—erupted like a fiery octopus around the towers.
Milo had worked too hard and waited too long to be here with Kennedy Gates and her falling sundress and her apple and her famous virginity. His eyes held her eyes.
She would have, he thought. She was going to. Did that count?
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She caressed his cheek with a gentle, exquisitely painted left hand.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m not really her. She always sends droids to these things. Parties wear her out these days. She’s not aging as well as they’d hoped.”
Below their feet, a rise in temperature.
Well, shit, thought Milo.
The Kennedy bot retrieved a compact mahogany plaque from her shoulder bag and handed it to him.
I, read the plaque, MILO GALAPAGOS ROCKEFELLER BUFFETT GALIFIANAKIS CLXIII, TOOK, BY ROBOTIC PROXY, THE SURGICALLY RESTORED VIRGINITY OF KENNEDY PRITZKER HELLECONIA GATES.
Dated June 28, A.D. 2140.
“It’ll have to do,” said Milo.
“Well, good,” said the droid.
He just barely had time to prop the plaque on one of the stall doors and stand for a moment, admiring it and stroking Elsie’s neck, before everything came apart and the sun swallowed them down.
Milo’s Sun Palace life was the cosmic version of flunking second grade.
He had set himself a challenge, and he had failed. Privilege had turned him into a ridiculous, self-important goat.
The universe sent him back to Earth as a bug. Usually you get to choose what kind of life you’re going to live, but not if you really screw the pooch. He became a cricket. In China. In 1903.
This time around, he was a raging success.
A little girl captured him and kept him in a wooden cage, hung from the ceiling. He learned to chirp when she pressed her nose against the cage and giggled at him. It wasn’t much, but it made her love him. Not many crickets get to be loved. Even fewer crickets receive elegant funerals, but when he died, the girl made him a tiny coffin and set him adrift amid lily pads on a pond in the city park.
He went straight to the afterlife, redeemed somewhat, after that. Lesson learned, one would hope.