KING’S COLLEGE, CHRISTMINSTER, BRIDGER’S PLANET, A.D. 3417

An old stone bridge.

A primordial morning, full of mists and loomings. A river of mist flowed under the bridge, and a shore of mist came to meet it.

The mist retreated before morning sunlight, and a stone church emerged, as if rising out of time. It was followed, at a distance, by a stone clock tower.

Three wooden sculls, flying like spears across mist and water, shot out from under the bridge. Strong, hearty voices called out:

“Stroke, slow the slide!”

“Power three on five, boys! One, two…”

“Three, hands down and away!”

On the shore, shouts and cheers from people half visible:

“Huzzah!”

“Steady on, Harrow, that’s the way!”

Somewhere in the fog, a finish line crossed. A climax of cheers, jeering.

The fog lightened then, revealing a hundred or more boys in jackets and school ties. Among them, the robes and gray hair of professors.

The assembly grew quiet at the crack of a distant pistol and craned their whole selves to see upriver, beyond the bridge, eyes on the next race.

All eyes, as it happened, except for the eyes of Mr. Daniel Titpickle, vice dean of boys, who excused himself through the crowd until he reached the towering robes and frowning soul of William Hay, professor of theology, and tapped him on the arm.

“What is it, Titpickle?” rumbled Hay.

“It’s the Froosian Goose,” whispered Titpickle. “It’s gone missing from the Damocles Club again. There’s reason to suspect the Barleycorn Society.”

Hay, the Barleycorns’ faculty adviser, raised a dread eyebrow. Something made him skeptical, although it was, in fact, traditional for the Barleycorns to make off with the Damocles Society’s sacred Froosian Goose, just as it was the Damocles Society’s duty, whenever possible, to kidnap the fabled Barleycorn Bones.

The Froosian Goose was an ancient stuffed goose (shot by King Edward II of Earth, founder of the original King’s College), “a simbol of Fellowshippe” carried with solemnity and placed before the brothers at assembly. The Barleycorn Bones were, according to certain dark and secret lore, the skeleton of one Jonathan Poore, a famous priest and cannibal.

The Froosian Goose had been captured once or twice a year since the society’s founding some hundred years ago. The bones had been stolen only once, and the brother with the misfortune to be asleep on guard that night, according to legend, lay buried under the dining commons in Oxbridge Hall.

“If you’d come with me back to my office,” suggested Titpickle, “we can dial up Broode at security, and he can tell you—”

“No need for that,” said Hay, raising a ministerial hand. “Not this time.”

“But—” sputtered Titpickle.

Hay silenced him with a dead eye.

“It’s not my lads,” he said, “sinners though they are. Not this time. I’ll involve the police, if they need involving.”

He dismissed Titpickle without word or gesture. A slight flexing of the atmosphere about his person was all it needed, and the dean slunk back the way he had come, missing the unexpected triumph in the second race—and by four seats!—of the brothers of the Round Church Circle.

—

Hay taught his classes like a dark lord. His more-serious students worshipped him. The dilettantes scowled behind his back, until they learned that what the older lads said was true: Hay had eyes in the back of his head, and ears everywhere.

“Hay is diabolical,” his acolytes declared, “like all great religious minds.”

Hay usually took his lunch in Washing Commons, but not today. Today, to his wife’s surprise, he went home and asked her to make him one of whatever she was making for Milo. Milo was their eight-year-old boy, a challenging young man who attended Sparrow, a primary prep school attached to the university. Most of the faculty brats went there. It was like a daycare facility where they read Chaucer.

So Victoria—Hay’s wife—kissed him on the cheek and made him a meatloaf sandwich and fetched him a glass of milk. Then she went off about her housework, leaving Hay at the table alone, where he was sitting and waiting with his hands folded in his lap when Milo came banging through the door and dashing into the kitchen, all flying hair and shorts and class four tie.

Hay would have preferred for his son to stop and address him with quiet awe, but he settled for a quick “Hey, Dad!” and a wave of one not-too-clean hand as his offspring shot past, out of the kitchen quite as suddenly as he’d come in.

Hay terrified everyone on Bridger’s except for his own child, which confounded him. He didn’t know, of course, that his child was an ancient soul who had lived almost ten thousand lives, who had been everything from a king to a pollywog.

Hay waited. He took a bite of his sandwich.

He was rewarded with the boy’s reappearance. Tie loosened, shirt untucked, shoes jettisoned, but with his hands and face clean. He mounted to the table and, with something like good manners, addressed himself to his lunch.

“How come you’re home?” asked the boy, with his mouth full.

“I’ll let you think that over,” Hay replied.

The boy ate, and studied his father.

You could see the wheels turning, the way boywheels had turned for a million years, like the minds of little poker players, judging whether to bluff or fold.

“I’ve hidden the Froosian Goose in my closet,” said Milo, pausing to gulp his milk. “I was going to paint it blue or else with dots.”

He licked away his milk mustache.

The Barleycorns, a club of some twenty-five promising nineteen-year-olds, barely managed to get away with the goose each year without setting off alarms. Despite himself, Hay was impressed.

“Tell me how you did it,” he said.

“Am I in trouble?” asked the boy.

“Naturally you’re in trouble. Don’t be foolish. How’d you manage it?”

Hay kept watching for signs of the boy’s infant-onset asthma to show themselves. As a toddler, the boy would sometimes get red in the face and short of breath when he was placed under stress or if he was caught getting up to no good. The condition had been genetically muted since, but sometimes the boy still seemed to labor for breath, if called on his behavior.

Not lately, though.

“How did you know?”

“Young man—”

“I’ll tell you how I did it if you’ll tell me how you knew.”

“Last night at dinner,” said Hay, “you asked why a goose was symbolic of fellowship, and I explained that geese never leave one of their own behind if he is injured. One of them will drop out of the flock and stay with him until he recovers or dies. You seemed to find it all funny, in your way. When I learned that the Damocles Society’s goose was missing, I put it together. It’s the sort of thing you’d do. Now. How?”

“Sometimes they take it places. I was on my way home from school when one of the brothers brought it out and put it down beside his car. Then he went back in to look for his keys.”

“You made it from the society clubhouse to our own door, carrying the Froosian Goose, without being stopped?”

“I wasn’t carrying the goose. I was driving the car.”

Hay dropped his sandwich.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It wasn’t hard.”

“How did you manage to start the car, with the keys missing?”

The boy suddenly seemed less plucky and cast his eyes down to the floor.

“Did you start the car…yourself?”

The boy nodded.

Hay had forbidden Milo to use that particular talent. Not until he was older, until his brain was more completely formed. It was for his own good. There were studies—right there at King’s College—indicating that a kinetic could experience a decline in ability if that part of the brain was exercised too early.

“Where is the car now?” Hay asked.

“I left it on Braintree Street, by the war memorial.”

Hay stood.

“Tuck in your shirt,” he commanded, “and find your shoes.”

When his son was presentable, Professor Hay drove him to the police station and saw that he confessed to his crimes.

—

Grand theft, for an eight-year-old, carried a penalty of one year’s probation. At Hay’s urging, the court also stipulated that Milo wear a Dawson mole, a tiny electronic bug that nulled his telekinetic abilities. Milo made sure to wear it right between his eyes whenever his father was around. If this made Hay feel guilty, it didn’t show.

—

For the next several years, Milo focused on school, setting a high bar for his own achievement. He read and learned, took tests and won prizes, and grew older. A lot of the energy he would have used moving things with his mind, he focused through the more-traditional lens of his intellect.

This focus paid off. At the tender age of fifteen, he enrolled at King’s College on a faculty scholarship and blew the placement exams out of the water. He was permitted to major in subspace physics.

His father raised his eyebrows and said, “Hmmph!” as if Milo had impressed him. Not made him proud necessarily but impressed him.

He was not permitted to major in neuroapplications. Wearing a Dawson mole had rewritten his synapses, and those talents were gone. It was like losing a limb or a form of sight, but Milo swept the loss under his considerable mental rug and pressed on.

A faint, ancient voice way down in Milo’s soul whispered, Oh, wow, we might actually make it this time.

—

College was a turbulent time for Milo. It’s a turbulent time for most people, but Milo had to contend with being far younger than his fellow freshmen, as well as with being a faculty brat. Most of the King’s College student body were smart kids from wealthy families, whereas Milo was merely smart. Fortunately for him, his intellect won him respect, and he was still somewhat legendary for stealing the Froosian Goose.

He faced the same challenges that bedevil every adolescent schoolboy. He struggled to be cool and handsome and to not go touching his penis every five minutes. There were girls at King’s College, but not the girly kind he knew from middle school. College girls terrified him.

College girls terrify me! he appealed to his older, wiser self, a self he was getting to know and depend on.

His wiser self was no help with the college girls. The voices were afraid of them, too.

His fortunes became more interesting the day he tried to show off by challenging Professor Basmodo Ngatu in Literature 232, the Poetry of Colonial Resistance.

Professor Ngatu, a thin black man with a ponderous, imperial head, was not a lecturer. He was a discusser and a question-asker.

“Why,” Ngatu asked one day, pacing before the chalkboard, “do you suppose Zachary Heridia wrote his attack on the oxygen cartel in verse rather than in an epistolary form? Was he trying to fly under the radar by having his attack appear where allies of the cartel were unlikely to stumble on it?”

Most students peered into their books, while their fish levitated slightly above their left shoulders, recording notes.

It was dangerous to make eye contact with Ngatu. But Milo did.

“Mr. Hay?”

“Sir, I wonder if Heridia’s choice of form was more of an artistic decision. What if he wrote in verse and published in a literary forum not as a rhetorical tactic but simply because it was more beautiful?”

Ngatu strode up into the gallery, his own gold-plated fish swooping behind him, and peered down at Milo over antique glasses.

“ ‘The Suffocation of Emeline K,’ ” said Ngatu, “was written three days after the oxygen embargo against the Ganymede terraformers and published a week after that. Four thousand people died in that embargo. Six hundred were shipped downplanet to the Europa prison islands. But you suggest that Heridia, whose own sister died in the Jovian monoxide ‘accident,’ was more concerned with art than with raising consciousness?”

The other students had their heads out of their books now.

Milo shook his head. “That’s a false choice,” he answered. “Art can encompass both social responsibility and questions of beauty. ‘Themself are one,’ to quote Emily Dickinson. And I think that’s where Heridia was, at this decision point. He realized he could make the most of his message by making it beautiful and by presenting it to an audience who would appreciate that irony and be grieved by it.”

“Grieved?” asked Ngatu, eyes narrowing. “You believe this writer chose to elicit an emotional response rather—”

“People are complicated,” someone interjected.

All heads turned. The speaker was a female student, Ally Shepard.

“Miss Shepard?” asked Ngatu.

Ally Shepard shrugged. “Heridia might have written in verse for more than one reason. I think that’s where…he…was going.”

She waved her hand in Milo’s direction. A wonderful hand! Ally Shepard was like an island girl, imported from the tropics. She fit into her King’s College uniform like so many sleeping kittens. There was no place on her body that Milo didn’t imagine his hands, petting. Indeed, the wide majority of King’s College males and a number of females shared these imaginings. Ally Shepard was both president and premier talent of the Hasty Pudding Club, the vaunted campus theater organization. She was perhaps the closest thing King’s College had to a celebrity.

A brainy celebrity at that.

“It’s dangerous,” Ally was saying, “applying hindsight to something as complex as why someone wrote a poem, because the temptation is to try and make it make sense. We can apply reason, but what we can’t do is apply the storms and variations that govern a human mind moment to moment.”

She looked Milo’s way and winked.

“I would say,” said Ngatu, descending again to his chalkboard, “that your point bears consideration. So let’s hear about that. How did the artist affect the political chess player within the same mind, and vice versa?”

Milo barely listened. His entire universe was nailed to Ally Shepard—he didn’t dare look. Hard as he tried to be cool, to be more than the sum of fifteen years, he could only sit there blushing, with a vacant look in his eyes and growing discomfort in his pants.

—

In the week that followed, Milo suffered a sort of identity crisis.

Was he a cute little phenomenon, like an ornament the freshman class wore with quiet amusement? Or had he made his age immaterial? Was he, in fact, a brooding future Lord Byron? He imagined himself being photographed in black and white or filmed without his knowledge.

Soon enough, he would know which of these was his true self. Any day, the intramural clubs would issue their fall invitations, and that would tell all. At King’s College, future greatness was invited into clubs; mediocrity and cuteness were not.

The invitations—actual ancient-style paper messages—arrived under doors one wet, leafy October morning.

Milo did not receive an invitation from the Damocles Club. He did receive warm greetings from the Barleycorns, the Tycho Fellowship (a science organization), the Harrisons (a literary circle, publishers of the Ilion), the Harrow Intramural Team, and—what, ho!—the Hasty Pudding Club.

Just as he was thinking that he needed parental permission to join anything, his fish buzzed.

“Milo?” growled his father’s voice. “Listen: If you haven’t got plans already—oh. How have you been?”

Milo could vaguely hear Mom in the background, reminding him to “show an interest.”

“Fine, Dad. You and Mom?”

“Good, fine. Your mother wanted to know if you’d care to stop by for dinner, Friday? She hasn’t seen you for a while.”

Dammit. Lord Byron didn’t want to have dinner with his mom and dad.

“I’d be happy to,” he said.

“Well, good. Come by around five, dinner at six. Have a good day.”

The fish went dark.

“By the way,” said Milo, “I need your permission to join the Tychos and the Harrisons and the Harrow Intramurals and the Barleycorns and the Hasty Pudding Club, you fucker.”

Milo didn’t rush right over to his parents’ house on Friday.

When his classes let out at noon, he wandered the campus. The future scientist and author, hands in his pockets, windswept and poetic. Across the quad, through its forest of giant chestnuts. Down the cobblestone road between Stowe Hall and the pitch. Down along the canal, and there he stopped.

He watched the usual scattering of college men trying to impress college women by navigating the canal, standing in the stern of narrow wooden barges, steering with long wooden poles. Most of them were city boys who had never done anything of the kind before, and the rest were country boys whose whole boating experience involved no more skill than it took to yank a motor to life. Most of them went careening around the water at the very precipice of capsizing, their dates trying to keep a brave face.

Milo, on the other hand, had been paddling around on that canal since he was a baby—usually with his mother, on Wednesday evenings. He was in just the mood to get out there and show the older boys a thing or two.

“ ’Lo, young Hay,” said the supervisor at the launch, Mr. LeJeune. “How’s your mom?”

“She’s fine, sir. I’d like to take a boat out. Is it still three?”

“It is, Mr. Hay. But you still got to have your majority. Are you eighteen, then?”

“Mr. LeJeune, you know I can paddle one of these—”

“Like the devil himself, sir. But I’d lose my situation here if something was to—”

“I’ll sign,” said a familiar and awful voice. “Pay him, Milo.”

Ally Shepard.

He wished he were dead.

“I don’t think—” he began, but then she touched his arm, and it was all warm kittens. Oh, did she smell nice.

She sat down in the bow of the nearest gondola, looking up at him through designer shades. And Mr. LeJeune handed him a receipt and an oar, and just like that he was master of King’s College again.

Expertly, he stepped onto the stern and drove her into the channel. They might have been riding on glass, so smoothly did he steer. And it was just as he would have daydreamed. He cut through the rest of them like a shark through a lot of clownfish, pivoted to starboard, and made speed for the castle bridge. And, oh, did the young blades glare! And, oh, did their dates raise their eyebrows, impressed!

“You’re good at this,” she told him.

He shrugged, giving his hair a rakish flip.

They passed between stone walls, under two stone bridges, where Milo had to duck. The vast green plain of St. Martin’s yard opened up on the port side of the canal. Beyond, the cliffs and spires of St. Martin’s itself.

Ally slipped out of her loafers. And her stockings, too. Then she spun around on the bench, hiked her skirt halfway up her thighs, threw one leg over each side of the bow, and let her exquisite feet trail in the water.

Milo yanked his shirttail out of his khakis, anticipating an erection.

She tucked her head around one shoulder, looking at him upside down. How could he meet her eyes, when the rest of her was hiked up and spread out like that?

Be bold, advised Milo’s ancient selves in the depths of his head.

Milo did what Lord Byron would do. He looked at her legs, gave the rest of her a burning stare, then turned the burning stare on her eyes.

In my biography, he thought, when they write about my women, they will say I was mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

She laughed, righted herself, and turned again to face the canal.

Milo bumped into another gondola. Oh, way to go.

“Jackass!” said the older boy.

“It’s okay,” said Ally. “Practice makes perfect.”

What a bitch. He was her slave.

“Go to the castle,” she said.

The canal proper ran to the end of East Green, where it opened up into a wide pool, a convenient turnaround. But you could, if you liked, continue upstream all the way to the Brandy River itself. Just short of the river, the canal wound like a moat around the walls of a castle. This was the automated gatehouse between the river and the canal, really, but it was part of King’s College, so they built it like a castle and called it a castle.

“You don’t seem like fifteen,” said Ally. She leaned forward now, feet and hands trailing in the water, embracing the prow like a lover. It looked like something she was doing by accident, just relaxing. Was it an accident? (Hell no, it’s not an accident! roared the old voices down inside him.) Did she know what it was doing to him? He could stare all he liked, after all, with her head turned away. Did she know that?

“How old did you think I was?” he asked, ducking beneath the castle bridge, steering them into the wilderness portion of the canal.

Plop plop!—turtles, startled, slid off logs and vanished in the water.

Ally sat upright, scanning the shore.

“I want a turtle,” she said. And she slid sideways into the canal, almost without a splash.

Underwater, gone.

Splash!—bursting from the water hard by the shore and snatching blindly at a sycamore log there.

Damned if she didn’t catch a turtle. A small painted turtle. She held it aloft in triumph, tossing her head to clear the hair from her eyes.

She half-stood, half-floated, half out of the water, drenched and running like a waterfall. And quite translucent, Milo noted with wonder. Her King’s College uniform had all but become one with her pink skin.

“Shit,” she said. “I lost my sunglasses.”

But she didn’t much care, it seemed. She swam out to the gondola, which Milo steadied while she climbed back in.

“See?” she said, holding up the turtle for his inspection.

“Painted turtle,” he declared. “Watch it. They bite.”

Ally snapped her teeth at him and let the turtle go in the waist of the boat, where it scratched desperately at the wood, crawling under the middle bench.

“He wasn’t much fun,” she said, pouting. Then she lost the pout and squinched her eyes at him, saying, “How about you, Milo Hay? Can you be fun?”

“I invented fun,” he said, wondering what he meant. Wondering what she meant.

The woods opened up to port, revealing the castle. Tall stone walls, dripping with moss. Moat still and black, with leaves floating. Between tree branches, great spiderwebs caught the sun.

He let the gondola glide in, stopped her gently with a touch of the oar on the bottom, then shipped the oar and sat down on the stern bench. Let her float. He leaned back like Lord Byron, wicked and casual.

They didn’t say anything for a few minutes. She seemed absorbed by the image of the castle and by the way the sun danced through the leaves. Milo, too, let the quiet fall over him.

“How do you know you’re not a ghost?” asked Ally, still watching the castle. “They say ghosts don’t know. So how would you know?”

“Maybe you don’t,” said Milo. “Maybe we are.”

“I think ghosts go around thinking of all the things they didn’t do,” she said. “You know. Regrets. Like if you died right now, your ghost might go around regretting never being kissed.”

Now she looked at him.

“I’ve been kissed,” he almost said. Boys and girls in middle school did their share of kissing. But he absorbed the insult. The moment was like a boat you didn’t dare rock.

She lowered herself into the bottom and came to him and lowered herself over him, smelling like the river. And she pressed her lips against his, and he pressed back. At first he thought that was all she meant to do, and he was happy with it. Then something new happened. A new lip introduced itself, and he realized this was her tongue.

While they kissed, he was generally aware that her hand was busy between them, below their collarbones. But he was lost and mindless and didn’t think about it until she pulled away and sat up, straddling him, and he saw she had unbuttoned her shirt and unsnapped her bra.

Lord Byron would touch her.

He reached up with both hands, letting his knuckles stroke her belly. (Don’t go grabbing for them all at once, voices advised.)

He felt her own hands at his belt buckle then, and his heart raced. She would feel, see how hard he was. Was that good? Would she be offended?

Standing suddenly, nearly upsetting the boat, Ally reached up under her skirt and pulled her panties down. Stepped out of them and straddled Milo. She worked her way down around him and he was inside her.

My God! His entire mind and body whizzed and sparked.

Immediately, orgasm approached like a surging, drooling beast. In that time, he was both frightened and astonished by Ally Shepard, who bucked with her hips and had a look in her eyes that, honestly, he didn’t like very much. As if she were striking out at someone.

And then everything was topsy-turvy, with a scream and a laugh, and he was underwater, in all that murk, with water up his nose and his pants around his knees. Ally had jerked them over sideways, capsizing them.

The moat was shallow. He found the bottom and stood, sputtering. Fumbling with his belt.

“Dammit, Ally!” he croaked.

She was sputtering, too, and still laughing. She had recovered quickly and was onshore, shoes in one hand, turtle in the other. Shirt and bra still open.

“At least you’ve got that much,” she said, “if you die in your sleep tonight.” And she walked off into the woods, toward campus.

He loved her and hated her.

The gondola floated, half sunk, on the dark water. He dragged it ashore, dumped it out, and rowed home.

He felt kind of like Lord Byron and kind of like Little Boy Blue.

He was, for the moment, a happily confused young man.

—

Dinner at his parents’ house was a stilted affair.

“You seem preoccupied,” said his father, glowering over the roast beef.

“Oh?” said Milo. “No. Not really.”

“Well, where are you?” asked his mother, laughing. “You’re not here. I think it’s a girl.”

Milo’s stomach lurched.

“There is something,” he said, “but it’s not a girl. It’s about the clubs.”

His father chewed ponderously, frowning.

“You’ve already taken on more than you should, for your age,” he said. “Extras can wait until next year, I should think.”

Dammit, thought Milo, Dad knew you got invited only once. You either got on board freshman year or you didn’t get on at all. Before he could phrase this in a way calculated not to piss his father off, though, the doorbell rang.

Maybe it was Ally Shepard. It would be just like her, he thought, to surprise him and make him uncomfortable.

It wasn’t Ally. It was two Christminster policemen.

“Milo Hay? Are you Milo Hay?”

“Yes.”

“You’re under arrest,” they said, and grabbed him and spun him around and put handcuffs on him.

“Milo?” called his mother from the other room. “Who is it?”

“Jesus Christ!” cried Milo. “For what?”

“Rape, Mr. Hay. This way, please.”

—

While he was sitting downtown in a jail cell, Milo’s ancient-soul voices tried to comfort him. The forms your life takes are illusions, said the voices. Happiness or jail—it’s transitory, like a dream.

“The truth will out,” said his father, when they let him see visitors and an attorney.

Milo died over and over again, describing what had happened in the boat, in the moat. His father listened like a great stone owl, arms folded across his chest. But when Milo finished, his father did something unexpected.

He reached out with one great hand and cupped the side of Milo’s head with something like affection.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “Stupid, but not wrong. Don’t let them convince you otherwise.”

Milo nodded.

The attorney, a young man with a ridiculous pouf of bleach-blond hair at the very top of his head, shuffled some papers and said, “Fortunately, stupid isn’t a crime. If you’re innocent, you’re innocent. Open and shut.”

—

It didn’t matter that he was innocent.

He thought about that on his way to the prison colony at Unferth, chained to a bunk in the belly of a warp transport. Three days with nothing to do but feel how unfair it all was and to be terrified.

What mattered, it turned out, was that Ally Shepard’s dad was a rich Spartan banker and could hire a whole team of Ivy League lawyers. Professor Hay’s powers, on the other hand, were confined to his classroom. His worldly salary covered only the expense of the single pouf-haired lawyer, who took one look at the opposing team and was almost sick on the courtroom floor.

Ally Shepard, said the opposition, had been seen by a hundred people, walking across the King’s College campus soaking wet, in what might have been a ripped-open shirt.

“Mr. Hay’s student record,” argued the Ivy Leaguers, “is that of a precocious and impressively developed mind, accompanied by an equally developed ego. He believes himself to be a superior sort of fellow in every respect, Your Honor, and he treats his peers as mere prey. Given his sophistication, he is no more a child, sir, than you are. He is an adult and should be sentenced as such.”

The pouf-haired attorney, to his credit, tried to say something about Ally Shepard and a long string of therapists, but the Ivy Leaguers had complicated reasons why this evidence should be disallowed.

Professor and Mrs. Hay sat in the front row, looking ashen and small.

“Unferth Prison,” pronounced the judge.

—

Falling through hyperspace, Milo reviewed his transformation.

My exquisite life as the Lord Byron of Bridger’s Planet, he thought, is over. Which bites, because it was going to be a pretty fine life.

His stomach gave a violent wrench, and he fought back tears.

Now I need to figure out how to stay alive in prison. That is my grim new truth.

Nonsense, insisted his deep soul. This is the truth: stars, time, Being, Nothingness. Your boa.

Okay, thought Milo, desperate for anything other than despair. He would let the truth flow around him like an ocean, where the waves moved through the water but the water itself was still. He would be like the water, like the still, black moat where that lying, pathological bitch had dumped him—

Milo, said his deep soul.

I will be like the water, he thought, starting over.

—

The Unferth prison colony, he had learned online, was one of the most fearsome examples of spacefaring justice. Almost fourteen hundred years ago, when humans first left Earth and began living aboard ships and stations and other artificial environments, the problem of life support had become the guiding light for everything, including law. Down on Earth, they could afford to be warm and fuzzy and lenient. Violent criminals were freed to hurt people time after time. Greedy corporate moguls hoarded wealth and squandered resources under the protection of puppet governments. Everyone knew where that had gotten Earth, didn’t they? The moguls herded whole populations into debt slavery. Violent criminals made whole communities unfit to live in. Information and education were channeled so poorly that the planet lost its ability to look ahead, to think ahead, to plan. And so they drowned in their own polluted, shortsighted muck until Comet Marie put them out of their misery. All but a very few, spared and cultivated by the worst of the moguls.

Living in space had changed everything. On Earth, environments and communities had been vast, incomprehensible things. In space, the environment became something you could measure by looking at a gauge. The health of a community was something you could measure by glancing around a cafeteria. Air and water didn’t just come from the sky and the wind; they had to be processed, recycled, and monitored. Machines couldn’t just be ignored or argued about until they fell apart; you had to maintain them with knowledge and skill, or the monster hostilities of outer space would tear them apart and kill you. Quickly. Vacuum and gravity and radiation didn’t care about your beliefs or superstitions; the boa of outer space was strict and unforgiving. What mattered was what you did and how well and fast you could do it.

The elements of life support became, in a sense, as valuable as life itself. There was no room for bullshit and waste. If you were going to use oxygen and water, you had to be useful. There was no more room for people who killed, raped, hit, cheated, stole, bullied, or otherwise did harm. The wealthy criminals—those who manipulated the resources for profit—lasted longer than their poorer brethren, but the boa caught up with them, too, before long.

In the earliest days, right after the comet, harmful people were “spaced.” Authorities dragged them into an air lock and opened the outside door.

The result? Things got shipshape in a hurry.

When the OZ drive came along and opened up star travel, artificial environments gave way to planetary communities again. The reins of justice eased somewhat. Criminals weren’t necessarily executed. Room was found for them in out-of-the-way places, and they stayed there. Felons rarely came home.

Unferth was one of those out-of-the-way places. It was an asteroid, hauled into deep space, light-years from anything. The surface was a barren, cratered dead zone. The outer hatches led down into a warren of tunnels, and that was where the prisoners lived their lives. They could open air locks to eject waste, including their dead. But they rarely did. Nothing was provided from outside, so the population was under pressure to follow extreme recycling protocols. The inmates found a use for everything.

So it was thought, anyway. News didn’t really go in and out much.

“It’s an oubliette,” his father had said, by way of description, when they said their goodbyes. “A place of forgetting.”

It was his way of acknowledging that they’d never see each other again.

The professor wasn’t a dark lord anymore. He was a sack of clothes, tailored on a budget. A man who’d had all his illusions kicked out of him.

No one can live like that, thought Milo, crying, watching his parents shuffle away. Life in prison could take many forms.

—

Three days away from Bridger’s Planet, the cruiser dropped out of hyperspace at Unferth. A guard escorted Milo to an air lock.

Click! Clack! Boom!

A hissing of pressure and air.

The opposite hatch opened, and Milo found himself peering through into a kind of bare, rusty cube. A stale smell filled the shuttle.

Milo stepped through.

“Bye, kiddo,” called the guard. “Mind your cornhole.”

The hatch spun shut.

Click! Clack! Boom!

The cruiser warped away, leaving Milo in the rusty prison air lock, waiting.

—

He waited for five hours.

Finally there was a lot of clanking and the inner hatch scraped open.

A skinny old man greeted him, wearing burlap trousers, sandals, and a set of enormous homemade eyeglasses.

“Heh!” barked the old man. “Got one in the hole. You coming?”

Milo ducked through the hatch and entered the prison.

“Shut it behind you,” said the old man, coughing, and shuffled away into…dark.

“Hey!” yelled Milo. “Hey, um—” But the old man moved on, out of sight.

The court had warned him not to expect a welcome or any form of processing. His fish and its biocompatible wet-wiring had been stripped from him. He had not been assigned a number, and no record-keeping would follow him into the prison.

So where did he go? What did he do? He would need food and a place to sleep at some point. How did a prisoner procure these things? The courts had made it clear that this would be his problem.

The corridor was not, Milo found as his eyes adjusted, entirely dark. A set of softly glowing squares high on the wall provided enough illumination for him to discern roughly carved rock walls.

Down the corridor he went, feeling his way. About twenty feet along, the lights behind him dimmed into black, and another set came on just ahead.

It made sense, Milo thought. Conservation. There would be no combustible light sources, because they burned oxygen. Probably the lights operated on primitive motion sensors and a phosphorescent glow mix. It made him feel better, for a minute, knowing that the prison population was capable of such sense and subtlety. Maybe he wouldn’t encounter raw brutality here, after all.

A hundred yards down, shadows jumped out of the black, knocked him unconscious, stripped him naked, and left him bleeding on the floor.

—

When he woke up, he reviewed what had happened.

The prison was a resource-poor environment. It made sense that inmates would haunt the corridors near hatches, in case of a drop-off. He’d have to anticipate traps like that.

Atta boy! said his voices. Keep using your head….

Milo got to his feet and soldiered on. At least he didn’t have anything else they could take.

The voices didn’t comment on that.

—

An hour later, he encountered people. Real, discernible people, not just shadows and shapes. The hall opened up into a space about as big as an average living room, where several men and a couple of women sat playing a game with handmade cards. In the far corner, one man held a homemade-looking ladder for another man, who appeared to be doing something mechanical to a nest of pipes.

They all wore some form of burlap trousers, at least. Milo felt awfully, awfully naked.

He was hoping that this would be the point where someone would take him under a wing and talk to him and tell him things until he could learn—

A wise man, advised his ancient soul, isn’t afraid to ask questions.

“Can someone please help me?” Milo asked, and that’s as far as he got before three of the card players—two men and one of the women—jumped up, slammed him to the ground (“Look how pretty!”), and took turns with him until he lost consciousness.

—

Milo woke up with foggy senses and a body that felt bruised and crusty. He was crumpled up on cold, damp stone. He tried to make himself go back to sleep, but someone kicked him and said, “Get up. Clean yourself.”

Milo didn’t want to be awake. He wanted to retreat inside himself. At the edge of his mind, he felt something like a pit, something dark and gibbering. The pit was something like madness, something he could disappear into.

No, insisted the voices. You’re going to remain human. Sit up, open your eyes, and survive the day.

So Milo sat up, feeling like a car wreck. He blinked his eyes clear and found he was sitting in a kind of hollowed-out hole, as if someone had dug a grave in the stone. There was a carpet of sorts, made of burlap and covering half of the tiny floor, and some bowls scattered about. A deck of cards. Some dark sticks that may have been charcoal or crude pencils. Something shiny and knifelike. The hole smelled like sewage.

Directly in front of him, so close that their knees touched, sat a heavy, round man with thick, long hair and a matching beard. His eyes, in the middle of all that hair, were like icy little points. Like Milo, he was naked.

“Clean yourself,” the man repeated, thrusting a moldy burlap rag at Milo and pointing to a bowl of murky water.

Milo wiped himself all over. Some of the grit and blood came loose; the rest he smeared around.

Some basic communication was in order, Milo reasoned.

“I’m Milo,” he said.

The man pointed to himself, saying, “Thomas.” Then he said, “Eat this,” and handed Milo a bowl full of something like camel sperm.

He couldn’t do it.

“Not now,” he said.

“You eat whenever you get a chance,” said Thomas.

Milo ate. He tried not to think about what he might be putting in his mouth.

Go along, for now, he thought. Then, later, revenge.

No, said his old soul. Be the ocean, be the pond—

Revenge, Milo repeated, swallowing hard.

—

Sooner or later, the nightmare sense of it had to go away, right? Sooner or later, Unferth would begin to seem real, and he would become less sensitive to its horror. Right?

No. But Milo learned important things. He sensed that paying attention and learning were the keys.

Milo learned that he had asthma. Between the dark and moldy damp and the unrelenting fear, he began to feel, at times, as if his own body were suffocating itself. Lovely, he thought, wheezing.

He learned that he “belonged” to Thomas. Thomas branded Milo’s shoulder: Thomas 817-GG. This was the number, in the prison’s homemade system, that described the location of Thomas’s cell. He didn’t keep Milo by his side all the time or on a leash, but if Milo wandered too far away, it was pretty likely that someone would return him and collect a reward.

Thomas was a plumber. Sometimes he left for hours or days, taking a bag of homemade tools with him. Everything in Unferth was homemade. There were people whose job it was to make things. There were people whose job it was to grow food, make clothes, make paper, glass, brew alcohol, take messages to people. There was even a sort of school system, where people shared their skills and their stories.

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.

“Zoom 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.

“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?”

“Say yes,” Thomas softly advised.

“I’ll break his arm,” offered Gob, but Milo stopped him with the lightest of gestures.

“Yes,” said the man. And Milo grasped the man’s head and opened his neurochemical door.

“Go out and walk around and see how good everything is,” Thomas advised. “Milo needs your cell.”

So the man gladly left and did as Thomas said.

Later, eating dinner out of the turban man’s bowls, Milo, Thomas, Gob, and Seagram had a very simple but important talk.

“What is it?” asked Thomas, “this thing you can do?”

“Something natural,” said Milo. “Something the brain does, a talent some people have.”

“What’s next?” asked Seagram.

“I don’t know,” said Milo.

Seagram cleared his throat and spoke with quiet humility, looking into his bowl.

“I think I might have an idea,” he said. And he told them his idea.

Seagram thought they should “cure” the whole prison.

“How wonderful it would be,” he said, “if, instead of living like animals, we could have a civilization in here. A real one, where people work together and take care of one another. Where they do things not because they’re being beaten and killed but because they enjoy their lives. People have to have something to live for besides just staying alive; that’s what animals do. We need to evolve.”

“So Milo will go out,” said Gob, “and evolve everybody?”

“I think it should be their choice,” answered Seagram. “When they see how it’s made things better for us, they might trust him. But it’s going to take more than that. We’ll need to start teaching and learning from one another, or the brain-chemical thing, I’ll bet, will just wear off. Once they—we—have a new vision of what being alive is, we’ll behave differently.”

They sat silently. Meditating.

“We should get everyone to come to a meeting,” said Thomas. “One village at a time, starting here.”

“Yes,” said Milo, even though his very first thought was: Fuck no, they’ll just eat us.

—

They did not get eaten.

But they weren’t convincing, either.

Getting inmates to attend a gathering was pretty easy. Most of them were bored, so anything different was an automatic draw. But that wasn’t the same as being open to ideas.

They sat attentively through a brief talk by Thomas and Seagram. They even applauded testimonials from Gob and the naked turban man. But that didn’t mean they’d learned anything.

“We live the way we live,” said a man with a 100 percent–tattooed body, “because it works for us. The strong eat the weak. It’s natural.”

Murmuring. The crowd liked that.

“Yeah,” said Seagram. “But is that really working for you? Are you happy?”

“Is your mother a whore?” asked the tattooed man.

Laughter.

“Let me show you,” said Milo, advancing toward the man. “Maybe if you all saw—”

A small rock bounced off his shoulder.

“Ow!” he yelped. “Seriously?”

The assembled convicts moved in a single wave. They didn’t know what they wanted to do, but they felt threatened and wanted to do something.

“Let’s go,” said Milo, turning to his confederates. “Let’s go now.”

They might not have made it, except for Gob. The giant lifted people out of the way, and Thomas followed, throwing punches. Seagram waddled along, concentrating on protecting his own fat head. And Milo came last, every now and then shouting, “Off!” and people would back off long enough for them to get past.

They left the city and fled up corridors, working their way toward the surface. Some of the crowd lost interest; others kept following and throwing things.

“They want me,” Milo huffed. “Let them follow me. You guys take off down this next—here! Go that way! We’ll meet at Seagram’s tonight!”

“No!” yelled Thomas. “We’ll stay together and think—”

“Gob,” said Milo.

Gob grabbed Thomas and ran off the way Milo pointed, with Seagram following.

Milo turned left into the space divers’ ready room and threw himself bodily at the controls. The hatch opened. He took a minute, hyperventilating, soaking his body with oxygen, until he heard footsteps and shouting in the ready room itself.

Then he stepped into the air lock, shouted his lungs empty, and told the door to open.

Scraaaaaaape…psssss­sssss­sssss­sssss­sst!

The remaining pressurized air shot Milo into space, across the rocky surface.

And he swelled somewhat. And became cold and numb. Became fizzy and full and uncomfortable, as if his whole body wanted to sneeze but couldn’t.

But he slowed it all down, all his flowing and exchanging and burning. Slowed it down until he felt sleepy but not faint.

Then he got his feet under him in the light surface gravity and walked back to the hatch and the window and gazed calmly in at the mob, crushing and shrieking on the opposite side.

He tried to understand them. He tried to love them.

Good, said his old self.

He closed his eyes and meditated for a few seconds. Then he turned and loped away, out of their sight, across the broad, stony landscape that was almost totally dark, except as it was lit, just faintly, by the slowly turning firestorm of the stars.

—

He ran for a mile or more before choosing a hatch and imagining that it opened.

It opened.

—

When he reached Seagram’s later that night, his friends were waiting for him. Thomas looked a bit sulky.

And there were others. Milo recognized faces from the mob that had chased him, the mob that had seen him stroll away into space. There were ten of them, maybe. It was a start.

“You obviously know something we don’t,” said the man with the 100 percent–tattooed body.

—

Six months passed and found Milo living in a protein garden.

It was like a garden anywhere else in the galaxy, on a planet or in a greenhouse up in orbit. There were growing things, and not just slime. They had found ways to grind stone and waste into soil. They had engineered artificial seeds and built banks of blue-light generators.

Most people were smart, if you gave them time and peace of mind.

If you gave them a world where people weren’t terrified all the time, or angry.

The garden didn’t have a sky. It had stone. It didn’t have fresh smells and breezes. It had mildew and damp, the breath of caves and people. Milo and his first disciples tended the garden.

Everyone had jobs, and this was theirs. Milo planted and harvested. Gob maintained the machinery. Seagram engineered things. Thomas sprayed things and watered things and made soil out of stone and shit and dead inmates.

And there were others, building schools. Others, making drawings and paintings and nice things to put here and there and make the walls look nice, because if it didn’t look like a prison, then maybe it wasn’t a prison, really.

Yes, said Milo’s old voices, which were getting more and more smug by the day.

When they came to him for teaching, they came to the garden and sat in a great circle and touched hands all around. And Milo would start it off, a wave of images and sensory suggestions, and the wave would pass through them all until they opened their eyes and found themselves on warm green grass under a blue sky with white clouds. And flowers and birds all around. For a while.

That was the teaching: this imaginary garden that they could take away with them and remember and dream about.

Sometimes he went out and walked among them. They always gaped when they saw him in the corridors and the cities, as if he were something that belonged in the afterlife, or at least in hydroponics. They didn’t mob him as he passed. They just touched his linen suit (they were making better clothes now) and felt blessed if he turned his red robot eye on them, this boy who had made them men and women.

He was always humble, at least on the outside. He took time to stop and talk, to tell jokes and be human. At first, he couldn’t stop thinking what a bunch of idiot scum they were and how he wished to God that some beautiful young women would commit crimes and get sent here to be his holy concubines. But he was getting better and kinder all the time, just like the rest of them. And he stopped thinking of them as low and dirty and dumb, especially when he saw the builders and designers and artists they became.

—

We’re going to make it this time, he thought he heard his ancient soul say.

Milo didn’t know quite what that meant, except for a deep sense that everything was perfect. That something wonderful was being achieved, just by letting things be the way they were supposed to be.

“Let it be,” he told his disciples and all his people.

“Let it be what?” they asked.

“Let it be perfect.”

“Oh,” they all said. “Okay.”

—

Sometimes he went to the space-diving air lock and let himself out. His favorite thing was to take off his clothes and tie a three-hundred-foot length of rope to a davit inside the air lock, and, instead of propelling himself across the surface, he would leap out into space with the rope fastened around his ankle and drift there for a time, his own self seeming to vanish into the starfield.

Soon, he was going out to the air lock every day. When he wasn’t inside cultivating the gardens or out being worshipped, he was floating in space, the most incomprehensibly happy life-form in the universe.

—

He was out there floating like that the day he saw the approaching cruiser.

He zoomed in with his mechanical eye, watching the ship fire thrusters, slowing down.

It had been a while. He wondered what sort of criminal they were dropping off. Whoever they were, they were in for a nice surprise. He gave his rope a tug, drifted back to the hatch, and made his holy way back to the garden. Soon enough, they’d come to tell him about the newcomer.

The door to the garden opened up, and two uniformed officials stepped in.

He saw them speak with Thomas and saw Thomas point down the rows of radishes, lettuce, and corn. Saw them walk in his direction, so he met them halfway, among the pumpkins.

A man and a woman, wearing court badges from Bridger’s Planet.

“Are you Milo Hay?” asked the man.

“I am,” he said.

How strange to hear his common name. For months now they’d been calling him “The Milo.”

The woman beamed at him and said, “We’re here to take you home.”

—

They had a hard time explaining to him that Ally Shepard had finally done enough weird and not very nice things to convince her family to send her to the hospital. There, they decided that she was a victim of a rare dissociative disorder that made it nearly impossible for her to distinguish between right and wrong. The thing that had finally gotten her family’s attention was that she gathered up a group of children from the park and took them on a “field trip” to a construction site, where one of the children was slightly bulldozed, escaping with bruises.

Under observation, she admitted that Milo Hay had not raped her one bit and that she was so sorry he was in prison now and probably dead, and when could she go home?

None of this could be explained to Milo while he was leaping over garden tables, trying to get away. He might have made it, possibly, but they threw stun whips around his head and dragged his unconscious, holy self back out of the garden.

Stun whips did it for his disciples, too. Even Gob.

Milo woke up, somewhat, out in the corridor and was fully awake by the time they reached the ready room. He screamed, crying and grabbing at things, scraping his hands bloody, before they were finally able to stuff him through the hatch and aboard their ship. With a thunk! and a hiiiii­iiiii­iiiii­isssss­sssss­ss! and a flare of mighty engines, they carried him across hyperspace, home.

—

His parents were no big help.

They understood that their son had been the victim of a terrible injustice, but now that he was home, he might as well give it all to the universe and its crazy God and let it go.

“I call it ‘Random Value Shift,’ ” his father explained. “It’s how a professor of zoology with five PhDs gets eaten by a tiger in the jungle. Doesn’t matter who you are; things will happen to you. It’s one of the primary tenets of divine allegory.”

Milo didn’t give a shit. Nobody cares less about theology than a god.

His parents didn’t understand why their brilliant, once-ambitious son was now content to waste away in front of the living-room window, talking to himself. Or why he got up at night to go stand in the backyard, naked.

He barely spoke. He barely breathed. The only time they were 100 percent sure he hadn’t died was when they took him to the hospital and he screamed while they removed his holy eye.

—

His old soul was in shock. All the memories of all his past lives couldn’t begin to understand what it must be like to be torn away from Unferth and his disciples and brought back to this small, silly place where he was a kid too young, still, for a driver’s license.

Milo, said his ancient soul, his old self: Understand it and accept it. This is small behavior. Overcome it.

Milo ignored the old voices. He tried to shut them up in their own little room, at the bottom of his mental sea, but none of that happy brain magic was working since they’d hit him with the stun whips.

It was like being amputated from himself.

—

After a year, he made an effort.

He tried until he was thirty years old. For fourteen years, he dragged himself through the trivia and the dullness of normal, everyday life. It was like trying to run a marathon race without legs.

He finished college with a C average.

He found that if he drank, he could be social, in a way. Could stand to sit in a room with people and listen to them babble. So he drank.

He got a job going to people’s houses and fixing things. Complicated electrical or nuclear devices. The work occupied him just enough to keep him awake, and it was not necessary that he talk to anyone very much.

At home in the evenings, he watched shows on his fish or on the wall unit until they put him to sleep. Sometimes he would buy marijuana. These things became a respirator for his soul.

—

Quite often, he found himself remembering a certain night in Unferth when he struggled with his memories of home.

To have nice, useless, distracting memories, or not to have them? He faced the same problem now. He reminded himself to be distracted, and imperfect, and human.

He was supposed to accomplish something, wasn’t he? Let alone saving the minds and souls of prisoners. What had happened to Lord Byron, the poet he was going to be? Or at least the professor he might have been?

He sprawled in a dull gray armchair. Here was what Napoleon might have been, if the army hadn’t worked out for him.

Milo put his hands on his head and tried to move neurochemicals around, but it was like searching an empty shoe box.

—

One day when Milo was thirty, Ally Shepard came to see him.

Ally was well. She was an associate professor of dramatic literature. One tiny phase-wave tweak to her cerebrum had put an end to being crazy and doing odd, inappropriate things.

She was happy, except for one thing. It agonized her, what had happened, long ago with Milo.

She knocked at his apartment door. This wouldn’t have worked, normally. Milo didn’t answer his door or his fish. But he came walking up the stairs just then, carrying a bag of groceries, including a twenty-ounce clamshell package of dope. He stopped on the top step when he saw her there.

“Ally,” he said.

(Milo, whispered his sleepy, long-ignored ancient self. Do this right….)

“Milo. You look good.”

And damned if he didn’t rise to the occasion. Maybe because it wasn’t a small, tedious thing. It was a big thing.

He invited her in, and made dinner for them both, and got them both high. And when she lost her cool and dissolved in tears, trying to apologize and make up for all that trauma with mere words, he held her and let her apologize.

“Ally,” he said, “you don’t need to worry about that. You were sick. And you made it right. And besides, I enjoyed it, to say the least.”

Ally went home much improved.

—

The next day, also much improved, Milo bought a ticket to an orbital resort, where he ate lunch from a vending machine and then managed to find an air lock on a mechanical floor, with no one watching and no one likely to come by soon.

It was no particular trouble for him to get around the codes and make the switches work. He opened the hatch and, wearing gym shoes, slacks, and a light jacket, stepped through into the lock.

No, Milo, protested his very sad soul. It was the voice of a soul that had been on its way to a birthday party with dancing and free beer but was hit by a train before it got there.

Without preamble, he threw the emergency toggle inside the air lock and let the instant decompression blast him into space.

It was painful, since there was sunlight and radiation this time. Drifting away, between space and a twilight ocean, he roasted on one side and froze on the other. Within, he popped and fizzed and went dark.

For his last thought, he tried to think something holy, but a dying brain is a slippery thing.

I wonder, he thought, if the brothers of the Damocles Society still have that goddamn goose.