JOVIAN MOON GANYMEDE, A.D. 2150

Milo was born inside a machine.

He lived there with his family and ten thousand other people.

The machine’s job was to crawl all over Ganymede, Jupiter’s biggest moon, and make it like planet Earth used to be. It pumped things into the atmosphere and did things to the soil, and the people inside drove its engines and cooked its chemicals and lived sweaty, grunting lives.

Officially, Milo’s name was JN010100101101110. As far as the resource cartels were concerned, this was all the identity he needed. Only his family called him “Milo.”

His boyhood friends called him “Mildew,” because that’s how boyhood friends are.

—

His friends were Frog and Bubbles. Their ball fields were the corridors between turbines in the engine rooms. Their hiding places were tangles of hoses and storage pods. The haunted places they dared one another to go were too many to count: Where someone had been drowned in the algae pumps or died fixing the mighty lobster claws. Places where people had been crushed, steamed, frozen, or recycled.

There were occasional wonders, like the crawler’s scattered windows—portholes where you could look out over Ganymede’s craters and see Jupiter filling the sky like a magical whale. Sometimes they glimpsed cartel drones hopping across the sky…watching, listening.

They were on the residential deck one day, poking at some kind of engine jizz oozing down the wall, when screams exploded from a nearby family pod.

“God, no! You can’t do this! We’ll pay you! It was an accident!”

“We will find a qualified family, off-planet,” answered a hard, amplified voice. “Now let go!”

Two Monitors emerged, bulging with police gear. One of them cradled a baby.

“Our neighbors had an extra last year,” whispered Frog, his voice low. “They tried to hide it, but how do you hide a baby?”

“If they’re taking it off-planet,” Milo wondered aloud, “how come they’re headed for the kitchens?”

—

Years passed. Milo began working with his dad in the crawler’s great central ventilator.

The day everything changed, Dad found him standing way on top of the lung, riding it up as it breathed.

“Goddammit, Milo!” bellowed Dad, “you’re going to get us fired.”

Milo didn’t argue, because getting fired was always a possibility. And if you didn’t have a job, you couldn’t live in cartel housing. And because the crawler couldn’t support homeless people, you’d be sent downplanet. No one ever came back from downplanet.

“How’s Mom?” Milo asked, sliding down. Mom had been ill lately.

Dad ducked down a steam tube, grabbing a wrench from his belt.

“Keep working,” he said. “They’re watching.”

Milo followed.

“That’s why I came looking for you,” said Dad. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. Your buddy Frog.”

Frog brewed and sold affordable black-market meds these days.

“You oughta think twice about that,” Milo warned. “Speaking of getting fired. Or shot.”

Dad stopped. He whistled, and his fish dove into his hand, displaying schematics. Dad read the schematics and surveyed the gas lines overhead.

“Our cartel insurance can’t cover any more of the cartel medicine,” he said.

“So she’s worse.”

“Well, you’d know that if you came home nights, instead of blowing your pay at that…place.”

Shit! Milo thought. Dad knows about that?

“That” was Dreamscapes, a discount brothel on the rec level. Women could earn additional income as licensed prostitutes while they got a refreshing, narc-induced night’s sleep.

“I’m going to go fix something,” said Milo, heading back the way they’d come.

“You do that,” said Dad.

—

Home was a circular pod, with sleeping cells in the walls. Mom stayed in her sleeping cell during the dinner hour that night. Milo heard her coughing.

Dad wasn’t feeling too social, so Milo talked to the twins.

The twins, Milo’s four-year-old brother and sister, had come along on his twelfth birthday. Good thing their family had a top-drawer skill assignment and was permitted three kids. Carlo and Serene were their own universe of two, sometimes communicating in a language of their own invention. Laughing at things no one else heard or understood.

“Zee too,” said Serene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frog handed over a zip bag with five lozenges.

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

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

Dad handed over the chits.

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

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

In the corridor, heavy boots. Monitors!

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

They broke free and stumbled into the corridor.

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

Everywhere, fists and elbows.

The zip bag got loose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suddenly there was this girl.

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

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

She waved some kind of plastic badge in the air.

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

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

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

They followed, bewildered, as fast as they could.

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They gave her identical dumb looks.

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

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

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

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

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

Rioters spilled into the concourse.

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

Mom’s pills.

Then she was gone, slipping away downstream.

—

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

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

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

From the corridors below, the smell of smoke.

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

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

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

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

“That’s me,” answered Dad.

“Shut down the lung,” said the commander.

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

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

“That’ll kill the oxygen,” said Dad.

The commander leveled his burp gun.

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

Mom closed her eyes, trembling.

“No,” said Dad.

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

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

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

The Monitors’ burp guns sprayed green gas.

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

—

He woke up underwater.

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

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

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

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

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

(Are we downplanet? Is this Europa?)

“Mom!” he cried out.

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

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

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

Giggling. Pushing each other.

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

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

“Whootoi!” yelped Carlo.

“Nok beta,” answered Serene.

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

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

The twins fell silent, holding hands.

—

“Land,” someone said.

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

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

The island seemed to race toward them.

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

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

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

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

“Ho!” someone yelled.

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

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

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

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

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

The twins clung to her arms and to each other.

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

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

It crashed against a long white beach.

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you,” said Mom, her voice raw.

The strangers nodded.

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

—

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

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

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

“We need you to go back out again.”

“Aw, dammit, Boone, we just—”

“We’re out of redfish. O-U-T out.”

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

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

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

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

“Come fishing,” she said.

“I…we just got here,” he stammered.

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

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

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

Milo produced a croaking noise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m Suzie,” she said.

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s an antioxidant?”

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

Because I have an erection, Milo thought.

When in Rome, said a voice inside him.

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

Suzie eyed his erection.

“Is that because of me?” she asked.

Milo nodded.

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

—

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

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

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

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

“For fish?” asked Suzie.

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

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

Milo and Suzie didn’t sleep. Not then.

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

“You talk to yourself,” Suzie whispered.

“Hmmm?”

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

What was he going to say?

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

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

—

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

The crews boiled into action, tying sails down.

“What about the nets?” asked Suzie.

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

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

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

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

“Get your air!” yelled Jale.

All the older kids, the teens, started hyperventilating.

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

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

“Deep,” answered Demon Rum.

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

“No, Milo,” said Suzie.

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

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

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

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

“Jale!” shouted Suzie.

“Let him,” said Jale.

Demon Rum came skipping back and handed Milo a spear. He tried, without success, to mask a smile.

What weren’t they telling him? What didn’t he know?

“Go on one!” yelled Jale. “Three…two…one!”

The teens all swallowed one final, great breath and dove over the gunwale. Milo was the first one in the water.

Surrounded by cool, surrounded by blue, he kicked with his legs, pushed with his arms, and aimed straight down, where the water was a deeper, dusky blue. Like a sky in reverse.

Islander kids knifed past him. In a second, they were twenty feet below. Thirty.

What the hell? What were they doing?

They were using their legs and feet, their bodies undulating, the way a dolphin swims.

Milo did the same. He went down faster, deeper, and it got darker all around.

The others were out of sight, below. His lungs began to burn, but he didn’t want to turn back yet. The fish couldn’t be far.

Something in his head warned him: What goes down must come up and needs time to come up.

Shit.

Milo turned and pulled his way back toward the surface.

You have a lot to learn, he told himself. Take time to learn it.

Goddamn, the daylight and the mottled sun up above were awfully far away.

But he made it.

He broke the surface in a universe of shooting pain. Pain like explosions in his lungs. He opened his throat and screamed in reverse, sucking up air like an anaconda; he got water, too, but didn’t care. Coughed it up.

Suzie grabbed him and dragged him into the boat.

He was bleeding. He could feel it. His eyes and ears.

“You are one simple fucker, you know that?” Suzie bellowed at him. Was she hitting him? Hard to tell. Parts of him felt sharp and broken; other parts felt dead. “If that’s all the smarter you can be, like a two-year-old, I don’t care if it breaks my heart, you asshole, I’ll—”

“Leave him alone,” said a young voice. Very young. Demon Rum. “Let him come around. He was brave.”

“He was stupid,” spat Suzie.

“He was learning. Still, Jale’s gonna be pissed.” By the time Milo was able to move, able to sit up, the rest of the divers were breaching, breaking the waves like fish, gulping air. Some of them, including Jale, had thrashing fish on their spears. Redfish the size of small children, with long red whiskers and narrow fins.

The young kids cheered and helped them aboard.

—

Celebration! There were extra food and water rations when false night came around and Jupiter eclipsed the sun. And they sang some songs.

Milo sat down beside Jale, who was snuggling with Chili Pepper, and said, “I’ll be able to do it right next time.”

He didn’t know how he would do this, exactly, but he felt that it was true.

But Jale said, “No.”

“Listen,” he said, “back on the crawler—”

“Forget the crawler,” she said. “You wait ’til Chili has had time to teach you right. You and Suzie can both learn, and then next time—”

But Milo was already standing, already heading back toward his place by the mast.

Dammit, he thought. I was just being courteous, anyway. Whose permission—

“Milo,” said Chili Pepper, calling after him. “Jale’s captain. Her own father does what she says, when we’re on the water.”

Milo tuned him out by playing some music inside his head.

—

A day later, when Frodo sighted minnies, Milo grabbed a spear and went over the side right after the others, before anyone could stop him.

“Shit, Milo!” both Suzie and Demon Rum cried.

But Milo had been conferencing with the voices in his head, and they had given him some helpful memories from other lives (so the voices said).

You could imagine your brain was a house, with a toolroom inside. You could open that toolroom and find ways to make your brain work better. He recalled floating in space, at peace, stark naked.

He recalled meditating with the Buddha (yeah, right!). In, out. Breathing was much more than taking in air. Breathing was where your rhythms interfaced with the rhythms of the world.

Even when you were holding your breath.

He passed Jale, who gave him a brief, surprised look. The water darkened around him.

Pressure and movement. Balance.

Glowing dots wriggled through the dark…Milo struck with his spear (that was breathing, too, the death struggle and the spear trying to wrestle free).

The fast ascent, into light again, flying up through rolling waves, into warm sun and light.

And climbing aboard by himself, because, oddly, no one held out a hand, no one helped him over the side or complimented him on his fish.

No one even looked at him.

“Oh, I see,” he said, but he said it almost silently, because he finally got it.

They had their ways and their captains and rules because those things kept them alive. He had made a successful dive, but he was an asshole for disobeying Jale.

He didn’t make eye contact with any of them as they went about the business of storing fish and steering for home.

Suzie sat down beside him.

“That time was fucking awesome,” she said. “Way better than before. Smarter, you know? You’re not as simple as I thought. But Jale’s going to rain on you, I think.”

“Suzie—” warned Chili Pepper.

“Let it go, Chili,” she said sharply. “You turn your back on him, you turn your back on me.”

Milo’s brow furrowed. He loved her.

—

A day later, when the island came in sight, they still weren’t speaking to him.

Fine. He and Suzie and Mom and the twins would make their own village on the other side of the island. He knew about catching redfish, and they could grow some crops, maybe.

“Hey,” said Suzie, waking him up, nudging him with a big toe.

It was the supernatural time of day, eclipse time. The great planet was a hole in the sky, surrounded by misty light and stars.

“Hey,” said Suzie, lying down beside him, facing him. “Do you remember me, from before?”

“Sure,” he whispered. “From the day the riot started.”

“Not that,” she said. “Before then. Before…”

“I never met you before then. I’m sure we must’ve passed on the concourse or on the rec level or something, but we must’ve gone to different classes and sims—”

She pressed her whole hand against his mouth.

“Listen: You know when we talked about the voices?”

“The voices got me in trouble,” he muttered.

“I think those are, like, memories from when we’ve lived…before.”

Milo considered what had happened when he dove. The things he knew about the breathing, which were things he had never been taught.

“I think,” she said, “there’s a reason you feel familiar to me,” and Milo realized that she had his penis in her hand.

—

An hour later, there was a general stirring in the boat, and sounds of alarm.

“Shit,” said Jale, up in the prow.

Milo followed her eyes and saw that they were home. There sat the island, green and jagged, with its hills and grass and the village behind the long white beach.

And up on top of it all, over the tallest hill, hovered a cartel tanker ship.

It looked like a coffee kettle welded to a toilet, bigger than an ancient football stadium, steaming and hissing.

“What…” began Milo.

“Trouble,” said Jale, helping to pull the outrigger ashore, forgetting to ignore him.

She assigned High Voltage and Demon Rum to unload the fish from all three boats, then ran into the trees without another word.

They all followed. Everyone seemed to have an idea what was going on. Everyone but Milo and Suzie.

They weren’t in shape the way the islanders were, and the island kids left them behind without hesitation. Suzie kept her eye on what little trail there was to follow, and they hopped over fallen trees and around tangled vines, eventually stumbling out of the forest.

There was a factory on top of the hill. Looked like one, anyway. Looked as if giants had stood an old-fashioned submarine on its end and driven it into the ground. A towering, rusty, patched-up engine, clanking and steaming, full of hoses and oil stains. Over that, the tanker loomed.

“What in the name of…” Suzie began.

“It’s a well,” said Milo, who had been shadowing his dad around machinery for at least a decade. “A gigantic well, with a huge, piece-of-shit water pump.”

Not far away, Jale and Boone and a whole lot of islanders were arguing with two armored Monitors. One commander, with a red helmet, and a deputy with a burp gun.

Milo and Suzie jogged over to listen.

“This machinery is your responsibility,” crackled the deputy, through his speaker. “Either you keep it running your way or we will assist you.”

“Is that what you call it?” sneered Boone. “Sending a fifty-year-old grandmother down to fix a valve with a nine-pound wrench?”

“She is your chief mechanic,” said the commander.

“Was,” said Boone.

Jale slapped angry tears from her face and turned away.

“You may have five minutes to select another volunteer,” said the commander. “Or we will choose for you.”

“There is no one!” roared Boone. “Why won’t you understand? The mechanics can’t dive that far! Even if a diver could get down there, they wouldn’t know what to look for—”

The commander lifted Boone by the throat and held him in the air.

“Four minutes,” he crackled, letting Boone slump to the ground.

The islanders stood there without breathing or speaking.

“I’ll go,” said Milo.

Suzie smacked him—hard—across the back. “You don’t even know what it is!” she hissed.

“They need someone to dive down and fix something,” said Milo. “I can do both of those things.”

Jale shook her head.

“You’re on punishment,” she said.

Everyone stared at her in disbelief.

“Jale?” said Boone, picking himself up, rubbing at his throat. “You wanna bring me up to speed?”

—

Four minutes later, Boone and a team of mechanics led Milo into the rusty submarine—the water pump—and showed him what to do.

The pump was a cave of pipes and hoses and greasy turning things, stinking of scorched oil and exhaust.

“This is what we do,” the mechanics explained. “Everyone on the island—everyone on all the islands—runs these goddamn pumps for the water cartel. It’s a lot of digging and a lot of fixing and a lot of broken bones and skulls.”

At the submarine’s core, something like an anaconda snaked down into a pool of groundwater. The pool was the well itself.

“It goes down a thousand feet,” the mechanics told him. “You have to go down that far to get below the toxins in the water table.”

“Holy shit,” said Milo.

“He can’t dive that far,” said Suzie quietly. “No one can.”

The lead mechanic (new lead mechanic), Big Bird, shook her head.

“The stuck valve is four hundred feet down.”

“Christ on a stick,” said Milo, “they don’t have scuba gear for shit like that?”

“The well is too narrow for gear,” said Big Bird, “with the drill head in place.”

“Can’t you raise the drill head?” asked Milo.

“Not with the valve stuck. It’s a safety feature.”

Big Bird handed him a crescent wrench so heavy he had to hold it with both hands.

“The valve chuck is a bright-orange nut,” she said, “but you won’t be able to see it in the dark. It sticks out a ways; you’ll probably just hit it as you go down. It’s the only thing down there that fits this wrench.”

They stood silently looking at each other.

“Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey,” she said.

“I know,” said Milo.

“Let him get ready,” said Suzie.

The mechanics backed away. So did Suzie.

—

He stood there for a time.

From some distance away, he probably looked to Suzie and the mechanics as if he was meditating.

I have a big mouth, he was thinking.

In fact, the sight of the hole and the dark water and the greasy machinery scared the crap out of him. A lot of bad had happened lately. It seemed a matter of destiny that it would come to an end here, with his drowning or getting smashed, just when all he wanted was to go off someplace and have sex with Suzie.

“Milo?” said Suzie, tapping him on the shoulder.

Shit! She could read his—

“You don’t have to. You know that, right?”

“Just another minute,” he said. “I’m oxygenating.”

As Suzie re-joined the mechanics, he felt more focused.

After a minute or so, he jumped in.

Splash!

Sick! The water was what you might expect from swimming inside a machine. Oozy and thick. Too late, he thought to close his eyes, but they already stung.

Gripping the big wrench, he sank like a firebrick, scraping against the anaconda hose, then bouncing against the earthen wall of the well itself.

The water squeezed him. Pressure mounting.

He tried to feel the balance and harmony he’d felt in the open sea, but it just wasn’t there.

He tried to open the toolroom in his brain and get the light to shine out, but he couldn’t find it.

He tried to meditate, but his mind kept thinking about having sex with Suzie and—

He slammed into something hard and round. It jabbed into his leg and stopped him hard enough (almost) to make him yell out or take a breath. The wrench bobbled loose, but he caught it with his elbow.

Fuck! Idiot. The valve nut. He’d forgotten.

His lungs had begun to burn, but he had time to do what he’d promised, he thought.

He worked the wrench into place. It fit neatly.

Lefty-loosey…he gave it a yank.

It didn’t budge.

Of course not, he thought.

The pain in his lungs cranked up a notch (I don’t have enough air to get back up, he realized, and tried to ignore the thought).

He gave the wrench another pull. Nothing.

At this point, someone put a hand over his face.

He almost screamed. He did urinate, which warmed the water and felt nice. And he realized almost instantly what was going on. It was the dead chief mechanic, bobbing around.

It was all Milo could do to convince his body not to panic, but he calmed himself. Even felt the beginnings—way too late—of peace and balance.

He was also left with at least a gallon of adrenaline pounding through his veins. He was aware of this in the same way he was aware of his respiration.

Milo put his whole body into one massive tug, and the nut came loose and turned.

And turned. And Milo heard something clank into place.

Up! Now! He launched himself toward the surface even as he felt his consciousness beginning to slip. Any second, his body would gulp for air, whether he wanted it to or not—

A dead hand touched him again. This time it grabbed his wrist.

Wild horror! He shit himself a little—

But it wasn’t the dead mechanic. The hand was a living hand, and it pulled him and kicked along with him and took him up…

(What? Who?)

Light, at the end of a verrrrr­rrrrr­rrrrr­rrry long tunnel…

Splashing through!

Oily, gassy air!

He sucked it up—delicious!—grasping the edge of the well.

He was so damn weak. He was going to pass out and sink.

An arm around his neck. Legs twining around his legs, holding him up.

“Suzie?”

“Just shut up and pass out,” she said, and he did.

—

The well sucked water up out of the bedrock and pumped it into the cartel tanker. The Monitors climbed back aboard the tanker, and the tanker rode its skyhook up into space.

Milo and Suzie lay in the hospital hut, sleeping.

Sometimes people brought them something to drink or a bit of fish to eat.

One time, Milo woke up and his mom was sitting there, naked, trying to feed him some soup (awkwaaaaa­aaaaa­rd…).

The twins were there, briefly. They gave him a bored look, said, “Fong!” and scrambled away somewhere.

“They’re letting me teach in the school,” Mom told him. That was all he remembered from Mom’s visit.

The next time he woke up, it was Suzie who fed him soup.

“That other mechanic finally came to the surface,” she told him. “There’s a funeral for her tonight. They have these toxic trees that burn like crazy, so whenever they have a funeral, it usually means a bonfire. Except you’re not supposed to get too close or breathe the smoke, or get the ashes on you, or go near the fire pit after until there’s a good rain. Other than that, though, they say it’s really cool and burns different colors.”

“What the flying hell were you doing down in the well?” he asked.

“What did you expect me to do? You think you’re the only one who can do that voice-in-the-head thing? You don’t listen. It’s the past-lives thing I told you about. We knew each other, and I think I used to be a queen or something.”

“Of that,” said Milo, setting the soup bowl aside, “I have no doubt.”

“Ooh,” she said. She liked that. She let him kiss her.

She let him do all kinds of things.

—

They left the hospital tent in time for the funeral, which was a simple affair.

Boone and five other islanders lowered the body into a sandy grave.

“Midnight Rider,” said Boone, piling sand over her with a hand-carved shovel.

That was the name the woman had chosen for herself, because it told people something about who she was.

“Midnight Rider,” everyone repeated, and they lit the bonfire, and stepped back and stayed out of the smoke, and applauded the wonderful colors.

Then they went about their business and, as far as Milo could tell, never mentioned the woman again.

Afterward, Mom took Milo by the elbow and called the twins with a whistle, and the four of them went to the shore together and stood—cautiously—knee-deep in the sea.

And they talked about Dad. Just talked about him. And cried.

And Mom didn’t say they shouldn’t talk about him anymore after that. Dad hadn’t been an islander. But, as far as Milo ever knew, they didn’t. He was part of another world, or a face from a fading dream.

—

There was another funeral, the next night.

Sometime during the high tide, with hundreds of people around, three sisters had walked right into the ocean, holding hands, and let the monstrous undertow take them.

“No one tried to stop them?” Milo asked Chili Pepper.

Chili Pepper shook his head. “Some people choose not to live like this,” he said. “It’s like defiance, you know?”

A light rain came down on the funeral that night, so the colors were dimmed somewhat.

There were no bodies to bury, so Boone sprinkled some sand on the wind.

“Betty,” he intoned. “Lunch Lady. The Priestess of Mu.”

“What does it mean when you sprinkle the sand?” Milo asked Boone later.

Boone didn’t know. “Just seems right,” he said.

—

They became islanders.

One of the first things they learned was that the islanders called themselves the “Rock ’N’ Roll Hall of Fame.” (Booty Dog had a twentieth-century pop-culture book called I Want My MTV. They got a lot of their names from this book.)

Other islands named themselves after their own mood and style. Big, glad names were popular, like the Sexy Geniuses and the Hookah Panthers to the north. There were serious names, like Hope Island, the Isle of Life, and Gateway Atoll.

“Things change,” Boone told Milo, “so names change. Last year we were the Twilight Zone.”

They traded with other islands sometimes. Here on the Hall of Fame, they grew a kind of grass that was great for twisting into rope. On the Isle of Life, they grew apples that could feed four people for a week. So they traded grass for apples.

“Last year,” Boone told Milo, “we traded a girl named Red Rita to a boat builder named Spock.”

“Traded?” Milo’s eyes darkened.

“Married,” Boone clarified. “Relax.”

Hall of Famers helped them build houses—one for Mom and the twins, one for Milo and Suzie. Milo and Suzie’s hut was made from giant leaves, mostly, and some metal plates salvaged from a cartel trash drop.

One whole wall of Mom’s hut was an aluminum strip with part of a faded advertisement on it, advising everyone to watch a TV farce called Time Lobster.

Mom made a better islander than Milo would have guessed. She taught in a little bamboo schoolhouse they had and took a seat on the New-Things Committee, a think tank for brainstorming up better ways to live. If you’d had an engineering job or a real education, you got pressed into this group. A man named Raymond Carver, a former cartel lab chief, had been in charge of this board for as long as anyone could remember.

There were other committees, with constantly shifting membership.

The Food-Safety Committee, which identified and gathered fruits and vegetables that wouldn’t poison you if you ate them. (Suzie took this group by storm, showing them how to dry and preserve certain fruits, and their stores began to increase.)

The School Board. The Fairness Committee.

The Tsunami Committee, whose members learned to read the sea and kept watch on a high bluff with a giant warning drum. This committee had a subcommittee: the Rebuilding Committee.

Milo and Suzie both became members of the Fish Committee. You had to be young and fairly healthy to be on that one, which they were.

For the time being.

Health wasn’t something you took for granted here.

Milo noticed a lot of missing arms and eyes. There were people with weird swellings that came and went quickly, leaving misshapen bone. Almost no one on the island was unmarked. Some of the youngest bore strange puckerings and scars on their skin. Demon Rum had a hole in his foot that went straight through (he wore a ring of braided grass through it). A girl named Bug had what looked like extra veins in her throat, and her voice was rough, as if she breathed sand. Many, many people had a bad eye, or a wandering eye, or an eye with a blue caul over it. Several people were blind. There were never any babies. This wasn’t talked about.

Milo and Suzie were also assigned to the Water-Pump Committee.

Everyone worked on the giant pump. But the board members were responsible for knowing how the thing actually worked and for keeping it going. They would be the first to suffer if the cartel came for water and didn’t get what they wanted.

“You’re spending the time and work needed for collecting food,” Milo observed, after a week, “on running this dinosaur for those fuckers.”

“No shit,” said Jale.

“We’d all be a lot healthier if we could send out two, three times as many fishing crews.”

“No shit,” Jale repeated.

“You’re stuck here eating fruit from the island, and most of it’s toxic.”

“It’s poisoning you, too, Diver Man.” She pointed out a swelling near his elbow.

His first cancer. Lovely.

They burned it off with a piece of hot steel from the trash.

—

In the first weeks that they lived on the island, Milo and his family attended five funerals. They thought that was a lot. Then the storm came.

It was the kids who noticed it first. Some of the younger fishermen.

They had found a dead fish on the beach and were poking it with sticks when the very youngest, a three-year-old girl named Moo, straightened up, pointed her stick at the horizon, and said, “Storm.”

The other kids turned instantly and froze. When someone said, “Storm,” it was a slightly less urgent form of the tsunami drum.

They all pointed together, screaming “Storm!” over and over, a piercing alarm.

Most of the islanders rushed to the beach.

Suzie and Milo had seen storms on Ganymede, on screens and through windows. But they were fitful, staticky things. Some wind and dust; the milk cries of an infant atmosphere. They had seen video of Earth storms, and of course there was stormy Jupiter with its cyclonic eye. But the thing that came oozing over the horizon that afternoon wasn’t just windy and dark. It looked bad and unnatural and out of place.

“It looks like a stomach,” said Milo.

It came writhing across the sea, balloon-smooth, pink, and horrible, quivering like jelly. Here and there, parts of it puckered or spilled like guts. The pink gave way to patches of decomposing greens and blues.

A stinking wind flattened the surf and took them by surprise. A wind like burning plastic and rotting feet. A score of islanders doubled over and retched on the sand.

Then they ran for the jungle in one flying mass. The young hit the trees first, followed by the unencumbered grown-ups, followed by those who carried children or belongings, followed by the elderly and the sick.

What exactly was going to happen? Milo wondered.

They ran under a huge rocky overhang—a shelf like a giant hand trying to karate-chop its way out of the Earth—near the base of the volcano.

It started out fairly roomy, but as the older, slower islanders kept arriving, they shuffled farther back, closing in tighter until they were packed like synthetic olives in a jar. Milo snugged up behind Suzie, wrapping his arms around her.

Thunder rumbled, and the putrid wind found them. Milo breathed through his mouth.

Then there were hands on his arms, but not Suzie’s hands. Smaller ones, seeking his fingers and holding on.

The twins. Serene was on his left, smiling up at him. Carlo, on the other side, had captured Suzie’s hand. They both smiled, but their eyes were troubled and questioning.

“What is it?” asked Serene.

“A storm,” answered Milo. “A bad storm.”

“We’ll be all right,” said Suzie, hoisting Carlo onto her hip.

Milo glanced around. “Where’s Mom?” he asked.

“I thought she was in here,” said Suzie. “Isn’t she here?”

Milo turned a full circle.

“Mom!” he called, but the wind had kicked up; other voices were calling out, too.

“Just stay with us,” he told the twins. “We’ll find Mom after.”

Quite suddenly, the air went green.

Flash! Lightning.

Crack! Immediate thunder.

And then the world came apart.

—

Was this what a hurricane was like? Milo wondered. The wind was like a steam press, pushing them and whipping at them with loose leaves and branches. It shot water sideways at them through the strange green air.

Milo didn’t like the feel of the water on his skin. Was it crawling on him, feeling for a way in? That’s what it felt like. Beside him, Serene fidgeted, wiping the mist from her face and flinging it from her fingers.

“It’s slippery,” she complained.

“I know,” said Milo.

Serene slid between Milo and Suzie and took hold of Carlo’s ankle.

“Bood buh ja,” she said to him, and Carlo answered, “Parka.”

Milo and Suzie shared an amused look.

“Parka,” said Milo.

“Fuckin’ A,” said Suzie.

—

The rain raised blisters. Everywhere you looked in that crowd under the overhang, there were tiny bubbles on people.

The storm lasted for hours, like something that had decided to hover over them and digest them. They passed the time whispering stories and conversations. They took turns napping and holding one another up. For a while they sang an ancient spiritual called “Margaritaville.”

The green air turned pink.

Milo noticed the trees outside, away from the overhang. Their trunks and leaves had developed veins (veins, or rivers of scarring where the rain had touched them?).

Leaves fell. Coconuts fell. Whole trees crashed. He could hear them near and far away.

Flash.

Crack!

The lightning began a barrage that went on and on, and the funny thing was, it lulled them. Milo and Suzie found their way to the ground and lay there with the twins between them and fell into strange dreams and wakeful fits.

—

When it was over, the older ones hesitated to step outside.

The storm had rolled on. They could hear it growing distant, still rumbling. It left behind a dullness and a stillness and a stink like a bowel movement.

“Let it dry first,” said Babs Babylon, a forty-year-old widow, the Hall of Fame’s finest toolmaker.

“Screw it,” coughed Boone, who had stood the whole time. And he walked out into the wet, through a big puddle that shined ugly rainbow colors, the way gasoline does.

And most of them followed.

“Take the twins,” Milo told Suzie. “Will you?”

She nodded. He didn’t have to tell her he was going to look for Mom.

First he caught up with Boone, who had stopped among some ferns to puke and catch his breath.

“Where else would people go?” Milo asked. “Did the Storm Committee find another—”

Boone shook his head.

“That’s the only one,” he said. “She mighta stayed in the huts, probably.”

Then he gagged and said, “Let me be, Milo. Go on now.”

—

Milo had no plan.

If Mom was at the beach, Suzie and the twins would find her there. But Milo had an old, sure, unexplainable feeling that they wouldn’t.

When he first stumbled—literally stumbled—over a teenager named Miss Nude Mars, he thought she was a pig sleeping in the underbrush. How weird, he thought. Pigs weren’t among the animals they’d seeded on Europa. But this animal was pink and round and was snuffling in the dirt.

“Jesus,” whimpered Milo, when he saw and understood.

Miss Nude Mars had one enormous tumor swelling along her left side, from heel to skull. It throbbed. He could see it tugging at her, under the skin, with blue blood vessels like tentacles.

She looked up at him with one rolling, horror-filled eye, her right eye. The left was collapsing and leaking yellow water.

“Fulghussss,” she gurgled. She raised her right arm as if reaching for him.

Milo ran.

—

Five minutes later, he found his mother.

She looked okay, at first. Just a woman resting against a tree.

“Mom?” he called. And he hurried, tripping over fallen branches and discolored leaves.

Heard her say, “No! Milo, no—”

She could speak. She would be okay; whatever had gotten to Miss Nude Mars hadn’t gotten Mom so bad. But what in hell had kept her? How come—and then he saw.

She was pregnant. Except not really. Something low in her belly was growing big and round, burgeoning as he watched. Stretching her. As he stood there, with a low moan starting down deep in his chest, he saw a portion of her skin part like a zipper alongside her belly button, which now popped out, reversing itself.

She raised a hand to shield her face, to not see him, to be invisible.

Through grinding teeth, she uttered a kind of stifled howl. Something old and sure inside Milo made him back away, made him run again.

—

This time, he ran to the village.

He barely spared a glance at the sodden, sagging huts that still stood, or the few misshapen islanders who lay on the sand, dead or dying. One, he saw, had burst like a fallen, overripe fruit. He grabbed a handmade machete from among the village tools and stole away uphill again, into the jungle.

—

Milo had to go very far away, inside himself, to do what he did.

By the time he got to her, she was gagging rather than breathing. Her scream was strangled by rising tumors along her throat, but she looked at him when he arrived, panting and crying.

As quickly as possible, with all his strength, he beheaded his mother with the machete. He was insanely practical about this, stepping nimbly away so that the hundred bad fluids that sprayed from her didn’t catch him.

Why? What had happened? Had his mother not gotten moving in time? Hadn’t known to head for shelter? Hadn’t known where the shelter was?

He would never know. He would try not to think about it. Already his mind was putting ice on the whole afternoon, packing it away someplace numb.

He backtracked and found Miss Nude Mars again, but she had split down the back and rolled wide open, and toadstools were growing from the torn flesh. The toadstools had tiny little finger things around their caps. They waved at him.

—

For a week, maybe more, the Rock ’N’ Roll Hall of Fame sat around and didn’t say much. Sat looking out at the sea and the sky. One man—a relatively young man, a former free-enterprise flier named Dracula—walked off into the surf and was dragged away. Forty people were there when he did it. They let him do it.

Milo went to Suzie and the twins, meaning to have them scrape the rain blisters off and clean themselves with ocean water (Was that clean? Was anything clean?), but Suzie was way ahead of him. Everyone was doing it.

Over and over, they went to the sea, up to their ankles, and scrubbed at themselves with sand and seawater. A few of them scrubbed themselves until they bled, and others watched them do this and let them do it. Until Jale came hobbling up to Cracklin’ Rosie, who kept scrubbing and bleeding and had torn three fingernails loose, and said, “No, Rose. Stop it. Stop,” and held on to her until she stopped, and kept holding on to her. And that seemed to shake a lot of them out of it. That seemed to be the thing that got the Rebuilding Committee moving and doing, and got Uncle Sam to hike uphill to check on the tsunami drum, and got them all gathering and speaking and touching one another, even if they flinched at first.

—

“I buried her” was all Milo told Suzie and the twins, who cried and got sad and mad, the way people do.

It wasn’t quite true. Burial hadn’t been necessary. The storm dead took care of themselves, was how Milo thought of it.

Serene and Carlo came to live with Milo and Suzie, who hardly ever saw them. The twins came and went as they would, like a windstorm, nontoxic and indecipherable.

There were funerals, when a week had gone by and they had a good idea who was gone.

William Hofstettler, Marny deJeun, Pat the Bunny, and Junebug. Cordero, Napoleon, Wait for Me Zane, Callisto the Stripper, and Wavy Gravy. Wavy Gravy, some argued, wasn’t really dead; he had vanished into a tumor cocoon, and when he came out, he was someone else. They voted to go ahead and have a funeral for him, and he attended as Wavy Gravy 2.

Dr. Hook, Velma Peters, Jalapeño, Kellogg, Double Dip, Jodi Petunia, Boone, Ivan Rue, the Last of the Mohicans, Milk Money, and Joelle Texas Radio.

“Joelle Texas Radio” was Mom. Milo had almost forgotten.

—

Time passed.

A month later—two?—the entire population lay out on the beach, watching Io and a score of tiny inner moons transit Jupiter.

Something sparkled between the moons on the giant planet’s upper limb. Like fireflies or glowing embers.

“That’s pretty,” said Milo.

“Yes and no,” said Chili Pepper, several yards away. “It’s cartel ships on the way.”

—

In the morning, sure enough, a whole cartel fleet came burning down through the atmosphere.

One of the smaller sleds roared overhead, thrusters blowing, and settled on the beach. The Hall of Famers dropped what they were doing and formed a double line just uphill, like a bunch of naked soldiers.

Milo was on his way up to the pump, almost to the woods. Raymond Carver, who seemed to have replaced Boone, shouted at him.

“Milo! Get down here and get in line!”

Milo opened his mouth to say something rude.

“Just do it!” bellowed Carver, jogging toward the Hall of Famers himself. “ ’Splain later!”

Milo lined up. So did everyone who wasn’t already on duty up at the pump.

Milo took a spot next to Carver as the sled opened and three Monitors marched out.

“It’s what they want,” Carver whispered. “You don’t line up, you could get shot or kneecapped or blinded or—”

“Quiet,” the commander boomed.

“We need fruit,” said one of his deputies. “Those of you not on shift, go get whatever you have stored, and gather half a ton more.”

The Hall of Famers broke ranks and headed for the trees.

“A half ton?” said Milo.

Carver walked off, pretending not to hear.

“Is that a problem?” crackled the deputy, leveling his burp gun.

Milo didn’t answer. He just walked away. Lazily. Insultingly, he hoped.

When he got to the trees, though, he gathered fruit alongside the others.

“Has anyone thought,” he asked, “what we’re going to eat, the next month or so?”

No one answered him.

—

Piling fruit on the beach later, Milo saw that the cartel fleet had been busy, too.

They weren’t just there to eat fruit. Something big was happening.

Enormous ships had descended on skyhooks and sat over the waves many miles out, forming a distant semicircle.

“They’re testing again,” said Carver.

“Testing what?” asked Suzie.

“A weapon. I heard scuttlebutt about it before they took away my lab.”

“Atomics?” asked Milo.

“Worse,” said Carver. “It pulls space through itself, like a needle going through its own eye. They call it the inside-out bomb.”

The Monitors over by the sled took notice of the conversation.

“Work!” they all boomed simultaneously. One of them started walking over.

The Hall of Famers bent low, arranging the gathered fruit.

“So,” said Suzie, “whatever’s in the affected area just disappears?”

“That would be great for mining,” said Milo, “if you could control it.”

“No,” whispered Carver as the Monitor approached. “It’s for getting rid of lots of people without a trace. Without evidence.”

“There’s an awful lot of nothing going on here,” crackled the Monitor, pushing his way between Milo and Carver.

They gave him their best dumb looks and dispersed.

—

They tested the bomb early the next afternoon.

Milo was clambering around on the pump when it happened. Something up on the submarine was leaking oil. They were going to have a fire sooner or later if it wasn’t stopped. So he happened to be looking at hose fixtures, and not out to sea, when the bomb went off.

Still, he was momentarily blinded.

The flash penetrated everything, as if they’d been cast into the sun. Milo cursed, throwing his arm across his face. The rest of the day shift did the same.

Except for one, a kid named Christmas Break, who had been looking due south when the thing exploded. He screamed horribly and wouldn’t stop.

Milo found the boy by sound, stumbling around in a universe of kaleidoscope-like spots. He grabbed the boy and held him close, restraining him. Christmas Break wanted to poke and claw at his eyes, but Milo held him until he calmed down, his screaming reduced to a steady moan.

In the meantime, Milo’s own eyes cleared, and he looked seaward. He couldn’t look away.

Out beyond the cartel ships, a crater had formed in the ocean. A perfect half dome, as if a bowling ball the size of a small world had been sitting there and had vanished. Above this impossible emptiness, a dome of clouds formed and whirled to fill empty space.

Wind rushed in from behind Milo, from everywhere, pulling waves and sand and clouds and birds toward the ball of…nothing…out there.

Water and wind smashed in from all points, booming and roaring.

Milo’s jaw hung loose. The spectacle was something on the scale of gods or giants, something human eyes and minds weren’t ready for.

The storm settled, leaving something like a wobbly star hanging in the air, a scar left by the bomb’s quantum arm-twisting.

Christmas Break whimpered.

“You’ll be all right,” Milo told him (lying?). “Your eyes should get back to normal before the day is out. Let’s get you to your family. Why’d you pick the name ‘Christmas,’ by the way?”

“Because my parents named me Melissa,” said the boy. “They wanted a girl.”

Milo kept him talking and not rubbing his eyes until they all got downhill.

—

The star hung pulsing over the ocean until the next morning. When it finally burned out, the cartel ships headed for the island.

The fleet, Milo sensed, was in the mood to party. And his stomach went dark and sour.

“Will they leave us alone?” he asked Carver, when they lined up on the beach.

Carver didn’t say.

The first of the big ships hovered overhead, eclipsing Jupiter and the sun. Other ships, big and small, followed it like a pack of wolves.

—

Sleds and cargo heavies landed. Soldiers spilled out. Not just armored Monitors, but soldiers in jumpsuits. The soldiers seemed amused by the naked islanders lined up on the sand.

“Go about your business!” hollered some kind of command figure, dismissing them. “We need you, we’ll call.”

The Hall of Famers broke away and headed for their huts, for the woods, anywhere but that beach.

Milo and Suzie watched from the edge of the woods as the soldiers set up tents and generators. More sleds arrived, spilling cartel people ashore. People in all sorts of uniforms. Military, engineering, corporate types in suits.

Voices grew rowdy. Glass shattered. Music wailed.

Now and then, soldiers marched into the village and forced islanders to go pick fruit or narcotic froojii leaves or “some of that colorful firewood shit.”

A knot of Monitors broke away from the party and found Jale at her tent.

“Where’s your redfish?” asked the tallest of them. “Show us what you’ve got, and bring sacks to carry it.”

Milo and Suzie, two huts down, listened without breathing.

“We haven’t gone out lately,” Jale replied. “We’ve been fixing leaks up at your pump. There’s no fresh.”

“Dried, then,” said the Monitor. “We know you’ve got dried.”

“We need the dried,” Jale said. “You’ve got our month’s fruit. The trees are picked over.”

A hard sound, as if someone was getting hit.

Milo and Suzie got up and walked over, without discussion.

Jale lay on the sand in front of her hut, cupping a bloody lip with her hand. Chili Pepper crouched over her.

“Can we help?” asked Milo.

The Monitors said, “Fish.”

“We’ll go look,” said Milo, buying time. “But we may have already given the fish out, put it out there with the fruit—”

The Monitor smashed him in the head with the butt of his burp gun, and Milo fell down and went dark.

—

When he awoke sometime later, things were even busier. Airships and watercraft growled in the air and growled in the surf. Music pounded.

The Hall of Famers kept to their huts, still.

Suzie dabbed Milo’s cheek with something wet. Jale and Chili Pepper sat nearby.

“Jale took them to the fish pantry,” Suzie told him. “Otherwise they were going to shoot you.”

“What the fuck,” Milo asked, “are we supposed to eat this month?”

“We get through tonight,” said Chili Pepper, “we’ll worry about that.”

Suddenly, shouting from among the huts out near the trees.

“No!” bellowed a woman’s voice. One of the Hall of Fame women went running by, wild-eyed.

Looking after her, Milo saw the source of her distress. Two men in suits had a preteen girl by the leg and were dragging her toward the trees. The girl thrashed and screamed. The woman reached the suits and pulled at them, shouting.

The suits appeared to be interested in whatever the woman was saying.

They dropped the girl, and the woman walked into the trees with them.

Milo stood, fists clenched. “I think I’d rather be dead than—”

“No,” said Jale and Chili Pepper together.

“You’ll make it worse,” said Chili Pepper. “It can get a lot worse.”

They heard the woman cry out from the woods. They stayed where they were. Milo’s eyes stung. Suzie gripped his wrist hard enough to hurt. He let it hurt.

Thunder rolled. Far off, it seemed. From around the side of the island.

He searched the sky, which seemed clear.

The thunder became a steady pulse.

“That’s not thunder,” said Chili Pepper, standing. “It’s the tsunami drum.”

—

Chili Pepper grabbed both Milo and Suzie roughly, shoving, shouting,“Go!”

Down on the beach, Milo found the Fish Committee dashing to get the outriggers in the water. The drunks on the beach seemed confused by the sudden rush of bodies and boats; they milled around and laughed, staggering out of the way. Someone turned the music up.

“Something spooked the moon niggers,” Milo heard as he dodged between suits and splashed into the surf.

Dark figures came flying out of the trees: the night shift from the pump, descending on hidden zip lines. They hit the sand and sprinted for the boats.

The fishing outriggers were full, Milo could see, and steering into the surf. Downbeach, Hall of Famers dragged other boats out of the trees. Huge, simple boats, great logs tied into catamarans, with rough masts and sails. There were three of these, and it took hundreds of hands to get them into the water.

“That way!” Milo urged Suzie. “Look for the twins!”

One of the cartel spacecraft flashed lights as the island boats left shore.

Whoop-whoop! Sirens and alarms drowned the music and the shouting.

Finally, soldiers went running for the sleds and heavies, eating bananas as they ran or straining to finish drinks.

—

On the catamarans, hundreds of hands raised the masts. Sails stretched, finding the wind. Milo leaped aboard the second catamaran, gripping wet wood with his toes. Hands steadied him, steadied Suzie as she followed.

“How many islanders can you fit on a boat?” someone called out.

“One more!” they all shouted. “Always one more!”

They found an open place on the woven netting and sat scrunched together, taking up as little space as possible.

Overhead, cartel ships blazed and screamed. The smaller craft rode their rockets into space. The giants waited for their skyhooks to tighten and pull, nosing them upward like rising whales. A few heavies smoked and steamed on the beach still, engines flexing impatiently, awaiting stragglers.

Suzie poked Milo in the arm and pointed seaward.

The horizon had darkened.

“It doesn’t look like a wave,” she said.

“It won’t be a real wave,” said someone sitting nearby, “until it gets to the shallower water. Then it’ll stack up.”

The voice was familiar…

“Carver!” cried Milo. “Have you seen my brother and sister?”

Carver shook his head but said, “They got aboard somewhere, I guarantee it. Sharp cookies, your bunch.”

Milo had to be happy with that for now.

“Anyhow,” continued Carver, “there’s a steep drop-off farther out. We’re trying to sail past that before the wave gets there.”

“We’re not going fast enough,” growled a woman with a tumor swelling behind her left ear.

Three men adjusted a mighty rope. The catamaran leaned sideways, causing its passengers to dig into the netting with their fingers. The boat gained speed.

Then the ocean dropped out from under them.

The catamaran seemed to nosedive, and Milo understood that the tsunami’s trough had reached them.

A mile away, the hump he had seen speeding along the horizon had begun building into a mountain.

“Holy God,” said Milo.

Before another breath passed, it was on them. Suzie squeezed his arm as the sea ballooned under them, tilting them up and lifting them into the sky.

Several islanders lost their grip and tumbled into the crazy water. They did not reappear.

Looking back toward the island, Milo saw that the cartel heavies were all clear, their engines torching hard, zooming straight up out of the atmosphere. All except one, which just now seemed to be wallowing in the sand.

The wave intervened as they passed over the crest. For a second, the catamaran might as well have been flying; below them lay the edge of the world and far-flung islands. Out to sea, the ocean was like a dark army—ranks and ranks of swells racing across the blue.

They slid down, gaining speed, their stomachs in their throats, and were thrown back up again as a larger wave took them, lifting. From its peak, they watched the first wave slam across their island.

The last cartel heavy, lifting off, trying desperately to gain speed, was swallowed up without a trace. In an instant, the trees and hills vanished underwater. Only the highest hill and the massive pump machinery remained untouched, surrounded by raging foam and whirlpools like jaws.

“Madness,” whispered Milo. “This planet is mad!”

Suzie shut him up with a long, wild kiss. The kind you feel in your throat.

—

A day later, in the evening, they sailed back ashore.

Not their familiar shore. Who knew where that was? The village was out in the sea somewhere or splintered among the trees in the forest. The tsunami had chewed the island a new shoreline.

They found a wide beach, and two of the great catamarans sailed ashore. They muscled the boats into the shelter of the trees first, before collapsing in the sand. Members of the Rebuilding Committee built a fire and began gathering shore debris for shelters.

“The twins,” Suzie said.

Carlo came plowing through the crowd, towing Serene. The two of them looked at Milo. Only looked.

“Good,” they said, simply, simultaneously. And they looked at Suzie, too, and said, “Good.”

They all roamed the edge of the forest together, gathering whatever looked useful.

—

The third catamaran didn’t come back.

“The outriggers?” Milo asked Carver.

“They’re fine. They’re faster, so they go farther out, take longer to return. They’ll find food while they’re out.”

Incredibly, they found the tsunami drum, wedged between boulders, its skins and ribs intact. They rolled it to the nearest bluff and assigned a watch—a woman named Jane Eyre, whose husband was missing—and left her there.

The Rebuilding Committee took an inventory of tools they had and tools they needed to make. Milo and Suzie volunteered to dig the new latrine. Cracklin’ Rosie, Red Wine, and Matthew left to scout for freshwater.

High tide and low tide came again, and went.

At sunset, they remembered the dead.

“Polly Wolly,” read Carver. “Jim Shunk. Justinian the Third. Bead Woman. White Chick. Mr. Henry. Caspar. Big Brad. Old Brad. Shakespeare. Sarah the Librarian. Siamese Cat. Conan the Avenger. Leave Me Alone.”

Out of the weird golden twilight, the outriggers rode in and slid ashore. The sailors walked up the beach and came among them without a word, except to join in the litany.

“Boo-Cherry. LoopsyDoll. Captain My Captain. Vaughn Gillespie. Indigo. Demon Rum. Word Salad. The Last Scientologist. Doris Fubar. Danny Bo-Banny. Good Grades, McDonalds, and Pookie of Nazareth…” and it went on, seventy names, spoken and repeated and not spoken again.

—

Things got back to normal.

Things changed.

Like their name. The Rock ’N’ Roll Hall of Fame became Sly and the Family Stone, after a famous ancient band.

Seven days after the tsunami, a cartel sled came burning down from space. The Family Stone barely had time to gather on the beach before the Monitors emerged.

“Line up!” barked the commander. “Everyone!”

Uuuuuu­uuuuu­rrrrrrrrp! He fired his burp gun into the air. Empty cartridges rained on the sand.

They came running from everywhere.

This isn’t about fruit, thought Milo.

“We lost a ship,” the commander said. “Where is it?”

Sounds of confusion up and down the line.

The Monitors were not playing. All four of them aimed their guns at a little girl named Mango.

“I saw it go down with the wave,” said Milo. “It waited for stragglers, and it got in the air too late.”

“Where is it now?” asked one of the deputies.

Milo shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Chances are it was swept into open water,” said Big Bird, right behind him. “At least three waves washed over this island.”

“Shut up!” yelled the commander, stepping through the front line and pressing his muzzle against Big Bird’s forehead.

“Why didn’t you warn us?” he asked. Then, screaming: “Why didn’t you fucking moon niggers warn us?”

An angry buzz rose up and down the line.

“You heard the drum, same as everyone else,” someone said. “You know damn well what it means.”

Aw, shit, thought Milo.

Uuurrp! Big Bird’s head came apart in a red cloud. Her body hit the sand.

Because, Milo wanted to say, the cartel suits and their nerds and goons had been too busy yelling and drinking and trying to drag kids into the woods.

The commander stepped back.

“Because you chose not to warn us,” he said, “a disciplinary action will be levied, beginning at sundown.”

Fearful muttering in the line.

The Monitors climbed back into their sled, rocketed into the air, and burned out to sea.

—

Carver and Jale stepped over Big Bird’s body, through the front line, and turned to face the Family Stone.

“Listen,” said Carver, “those of you who know what’s going to happen and know what to do, go do it. If you’re new or not sure, listen up.”

About half of the population left and walked back to the huts.

“Here’s what’s going on,” Jale told the rest. “It’s not going to be easy. The cartel goons are going to be here in an hour, and they are going to come into our homes and force us to hurt each other.”

“What do you mean?” someone asked.

“It’s something tyrant governments used to do back on Earth,” said Carver, “before the comet. So people used to switch houses. They’d send their children to the neighbors or to less-immediate relatives. That way, if the soldiers came and made them do things, at least they didn’t have to cut their own child or whip their own mother.”

Milo’s eyes stung.

We could run, he wanted to say. We could hide. But he knew what Jale would say.

They’d make it worse.

What do you do, he wondered, when you scratch around for courage and it won’t come?

You fake it, said the voices in his head.

So he said, “All right.”

And Suzie said, “All right.”

The whole Family Stone said, “All right,” and the line melted back into the village.

“Suzie,” said Jale, “you’re going to come with me. Chili is going to Rose’s hut. My father is going with Milo.”

She ticked off other arrangements, but Milo barely heard.

The twins. Dammit, how come they were always out of sight when things got crazy? Then he remembered what Carver had said. They were smart. They’d figure it out. And there was nothing he could do for them, anyway. But—dammit! His mind went in circles this way.

He and Suzie kissed. Around them, other families kissed and parted.

He walked to the hut where Jale’s dad, Old Deuteronomy, was already waiting.

The sun passed behind Jupiter, and the stars came out, and some of the stars moved and circled, and came in low, and landed on the beach.

—

In the dark, Old Deuteronomy groped for Milo’s arm and gave it a squeeze.

They heard voices among the huts closer to the beach.

There was the sound of the sea on the shore and insects in the jungle.

Waiting. Maybe they had gone?

Voices exploded, shouting. One brief scream, followed by the unmistakable smack of fists on human flesh.

Milo and Old Deuteronomy both leaned forward, almost rising, almost yelling out.

Be wise, said Milo’s head. He subsided. So did the older man.

Through the door, Milo watched a tableau of shadows and silhouettes. Mostly still…the shapes of the village huts, the trees near the beach, with stars beyond and Jupiter’s ghostly crescent. But other shadows, too. A helmet, the blunt shape of a burp gun.

Another hut—closer this time—erupted in curses and something shattering.

And another hut, farther down the beach. And another.

Sometimes it sounded as if every single one of the islanders had been pounced on at once, as if the night itself had gone bloodthirsty. Other times there might be just one or two huts getting attention, and you could hear every thump of a club, every scream or whimper. Some of the soldiers must have brought whips or belts.

Now and then, gunfire.

Once—for ten minutes straight, it seemed—a small child screamed a singular high-pitched wail of agony, and Milo heard muttering then, all around.

That’s how they’ll get us, he thought, despairing. Someone will resist, and others will join, and they’ll shoot us all.

After that, there was a long silence. Milo began listening for the sled engines, hoping, and he was still listening when three shadows crowded the door.

“Stand up!” roared the soldiers. Before Milo could move, a rifle butt cracked the side of his head.

They jabbed a rifle up under his jaw and forced him to his feet and pressed something into his hand. A whip of some kind, like a squid, with a hook at the end of each tentacle. A gun muzzle dug into his neck.

Fully amplified, the Monitors screeched, “Up! Get up! Get up, you fucker! You wanna die? You wanna die? Is that what you want, you piece of shit? Get up do it do it do it! Hit him! Hit that old moon nigger! Hit him—” And Milo saw Old Deuteronomy looking up at him with hard eyes, shouting, “Do what they tell you!”

Discipline.

Incredibly, Milo raised his arm and brought the whip down across the old man’s shoulder. Felt it catch. Felt the hooks dig in and the whip jerk to a stop and his arm jerk to a stop. Old Deuteronomy shrieked.

Milo gave the whip a flick, freeing the hooks. Blood spattered. Bits of skin stuck all over the hut.

“Do it again do it again do it again!”

Something hot stabbed him in the leg. One of the soldiers laughed.

Up and down went Milo’s arm—slash—jerk—(flick)—spatter.

They made him do it nine times.

Milo listened to Old Deuteronomy’s breathing, which was weak. The flare had begun to die, and in the fading light he watched the old man rock back and forth, just slightly.

He would hit the old man, Milo knew, as many times as he had to. He would, if necessary, kill him.

The soldiers took the whip from him and left.

“I’m sorry,” whispered Milo.

“Yes,” said the old man. “Quiet.”

—

Milo didn’t know when the cartel ships lifted off. When the sun slipped out from behind Jupiter, they were gone, and the Family Stone went through a blank, staring time.

About half of them had scars now, on top of their tumor welts and bent limbs.

He looked for Suzie.

Here she was! Looking dazed and blood-caked, part of her left ear sawed off.

“It’s okay,” she kept saying. She let Milo steady her.

Milo felt his undamaged body like a new kind of nakedness.

“They made Carver shoot Chili,” Suzie whispered. “Wrapped his hand around the gun and squeezed his hand with their hands.”

Chili, thought Milo. But it was an empty thought just yet. Just a name. Some kind of feeling would come and fill it in later. Wouldn’t it?

He walked off alone, looking for the twins.

—

He found Serene in minutes. The sea had dropped away to low tide, and she sat near the precipice with Cracklin’ Rosie, who wore a poultice over one eye.

“Hey!” Milo yelled, rushing forward.

Serene glanced his way, then went back to staring at the horizon.

Where was Carlo? Milo realized he had never seen one twin without the other.

When he drew closer, Milo realized Serene was shaking so hard, so fast, that it looked like stillness.

“Did they…?”

“They didn’t touch her,” whispered Cracklin’ Rosie, stroking the girl’s hair.

Relief.

“I don’t know how they knew,” said Rose. “We put them in two separate huts, but they went and found Carlo and brought him and made them…”

Her voice trailed off.

“Made them beat each other?” asked Milo.

Rose put a hand to her mouth and closed her eyes.

“No,” she said, so quietly that Milo had to read her lips.

Minutes later, Carlo came down from the village with Number One, Rose’s brother. Slowly, self-consciously, the boys sat in the sand next to Serene.

None of them spoke. There was a terrible awkwardness between them now.

Milo sprang up and walked away before they could see him cry.

—

In the days that followed, the Family Stone was quiet and hollow-eyed. They did their work without speaking.

Milo took tsunami watch for a month. Suzie left the village with paper and charcoal, saying she was going to map the island.

Some people walked into the sea.

The cartel dumped off newcomers, who walked into the sea or stayed and became islanders and took new names. Christopher Noonguesser. Rome. Posh. Sir St. John Fotheringay. There was a whole family of crawler saboteurs: Mr. Jones, Mrs. Jones, Yoko, and Fyodor, all of whom became pump engineers.

Milo watched the water and tended the drum. He let the stone and the sand and the wind have him.

—

“Gotta show you something,” said Suzie, hiking up to the tsunami drum one morning. “It might be important.”

She kissed him on top of the head. He turned and gave her a squeeze.

Suzie had brought Christopher Noonguesser to mind the drum, and she led Milo to a distant cliff.

Pointing straight down, she said, “There.”

An iridescent patch on the water, right where the surf broke.

That’s how they found the missing cartel ship.

They climbed down and dove to the wreck. The pilot still sat in his chair, strapped in tight, bones stripped by fishes. His passengers drifted behind him, bones in party clothes, swaying in the current.

Later, back ashore, Suzie said, “We won’t tell the cartel.”

Milo nodded. He acknowledged her with burning eyes.

They told no one.

—

Ten more people walked into the sea.

They had a big, fat funeral.

Jale said the names this time.

“Hobbit,” she said, followed by, “Doris, LoJack, Gavin McLeod, Peter McPeter, and Orm. Jilly, Nathanial the Digger, Mustang Sally, Nellie and Nellie’s Husband and Nellie’s Other Husband. Michael Ben-Jonah, and Carter, and Shane.”

Instead of a bonfire, everyone made a little wooden boat and set it on fire and sent it burning out to sea. Milo thought the surf would eat the boats, but the night was eerily calm, and they burned for some time and spread out and out, like stars.

—

Milo resumed his vigil at the tsunami drum, but he didn’t sit there draining away, like before. He meditated about things he remembered. It was like watching his mind play movies.

Movies of his dad. Movies of playing with Bubbles and Frog and favorite times with Suzie. Things he was proud of, like when he dove down deep that first time, without training, and the time he had saved the Buddha from drowning.

His inner voices were much clearer suddenly. He remembered being in Vienna and having a fiftieth anniversary party and falling to his death and surfing and being a father and living in Ohio and almost being murdered in Florence, Italy.

He sat there for five weeks, remembering, and talking with his voices.

He remembered quite a bit about Suzie. She came up to bring him some redfish and hikipikiiaki berries, and he made love to her on the spot.

“You remembered,” she said afterward. “Just a guess.”

“Yeah. I remembered.”

“Took you long enough.”

And eventually the idea came. It wasn’t brilliant or complicated or new. It was just perfect for that particular place and time.

It was an idea that began with a story.

After a while, High Voltage came up to ask if he wanted a break, and Milo said, “Hell yes,” and took his story down to the village.

—

They were having another funeral. Kind of a mix this time—some were suicides; some were not. It had been a bad cancer week.

Milo stood quietly, a safe distance from the fire. The story would wait.

They watched the fire afterward, and when a little time had passed, Milo cleared his throat and said: “Listen.”

The Family Stone turned and looked at him, and eyebrows were raised. Milo had smeared some kind of black shit all over his body. On top of that, he had smeared some kind of white shit, in the shape of bones. He looked like a child’s drawing of a skeleton. They gave him their complete attention.

“I’m going to tell you a story,” he announced. “Afterward I’ll tell you why I think the story is important, but for now just listen. Okay?”

Silence.

“A long time ago,” he began, “on an island somewhat like this one, there lived a man named Jonathan Yah Yah. And Jonathan Yah Yah was one of those people who are afraid of everything. When a bully beat him up in school, he was afraid to fight back, for fear of making things worse. All his life he was in love with Marie Toussaint but never once brought her flowers, because what if she didn’t like him? As long as he kept his love secret, it was possible that she might love him back. If he brought her flowers and she laughed at him, then this illusion would slip away and things would be worse. Later, when he was poor and had a dull job at a toilet junkyard, he was afraid to look for a better job. What if he didn’t find a better job, and his boss found out and fired him? Things would be worse than before. Things could always be worse.

“And then he died.

“They carried him up to the boneyard and buried him. And Jonathan Yah Yah lay there in his coffin, feeling all sad because of the crappy life he had settled for. Because of all the things he hadn’t done, because he was afraid. How silly it was, being afraid like that. Either way he’d be in his grave now. The only difference was, he might have had a fine life to look back on and be proud of. As it was, here he lay with his memories of the toilet junkyard.

“As it happened, Baron Samedi, a powerful voodoo loa, was sitting atop a nearby crypt at that moment, having a cigarette, and he called out, ‘Jonathan Yah Yah! Come up here and talk to me!’

“And Jonathan Yah Yah climbed out of his grave and dusted himself off and waited to hear what the loa had to say.

“Baron Samedi said, ‘Jonathan, you have my sympathy, because you have missed your chance for a happy life. But you also have my contempt,’ and he crushed out his cigarette on Jonathan’s forehead, ‘because you have let fear make your decisions for you. So I am going to do you a favor. And I am also going to do something cruel.’

“Jonathan Yah Yah asked, ‘What is the favor?’

“And Baron Samedi answered, ‘I will allow you one day more to walk on the Earth with the living, to do whatever you wish.’

“Jonathan Yah Yah bowed and was grateful.

“ ‘And what,’ he asked, ‘is the something cruel?’

“And Baron Samedi answered, ‘I will allow you one day more to walk on the Earth with the living, to do whatever you wish.’

“And the loa vanished in a great cloud of ash.

“In the morning, the sun came up, and Jonathan Yah Yah walked out through the cemetery gates. He meant to make the most of the day, more than any day before.

“The first thing he did was find the man who had bullied him as a child. He was going to punch the man in the face, but then fear spoke up.

“What if you are jailed? said the fear.

“But Jonathan thought about this and said, ‘Let them jail me. At the end of the day, I will be in my grave!’

“And he punched the man and broke his nose. This felt good, and the man looked afraid to hit Jonathan back and afraid to call for the police.

“ ‘I should have done that years ago,’ said Jonathan to himself.

“Next, Jonathan went to the house where Marie Toussaint lived with her husband, and he brought her flowers and gave her a lingering kiss on the lips. He saw a light in Marie Toussaint’s eyes that he liked very much, and he thought, I really should have done that long ago! Then her husband punched Jonathan in the face, but Jonathan didn’t care. ‘I am for the grave, anyhow!’ he said, and bowed his way out.

“Last, Jonathan Yah Yah went to see a cattleman he knew and said, ‘If you would hire me to tend your cattle, I would be attentive and thorough and take pride in doing good work.’

“And the cattleman said, ‘Very well. Come back tomorrow, and I will give you a horse and a rope, and you can work six days a week.’

“On his way back to the boneyard, Jonathan politely quit his job at the toilet junkyard, something he had wanted to do for years.

“As he climbed the hill to the boneyard, Jonathan began to feel a terrible sadness. Why, he thought to himself, there was so little to be afraid of! Pain? Sadness? Death? All these things came to me, anyway, and I have nothing to show for them. How easily I might have had dignity. A family. I might even have been a cowboy.

“It was much harder now, lying in his grave, knowing that he might have lived happily with far less grief than it took to live afraid. That was the cruel thing Baron Samedi had meant for him. And he passed into death that way, full of regret.”

Milo paused.

No one said anything for a bit.

“So,” said Sir St. John Fotheringay, “the thing with the black paint all over you, and the skeleton, that’s meant to illustrate, basically, death, right?”

Milo nodded.

“You’re saying you’re dead,” said Yoko Jones, “and so are we. All of us.”

Milo nodded and smiled.

“It’s about the cartel,” said Jale, speaking from beyond the firelight.

Milo nodded and held up a skeletal hand.

“We are living as slaves,” he said, “and pretending that it’s okay because there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“There’s not,” muttered Fotheringay and a lot of other people.

“We have absolutely no power—” said Old Deuteronomy.

“We have all the power!” interrupted Milo, with unusual force. “Because the cartels and their goons depend completely on us for work. The cartels could not exist if people didn’t choose to work for them.”

“We don’t choose,” said Fotheringay. “They force us!”

“Force?” said Milo. “That’s not possible. What are they going to do, come down here and move our arms and legs for us? They need us to do it ourselves, and we only do it because we are afraid. That’s not force. That’s fear, and it’s a choice.”

The Family Stone chewed on that awhile.

“If we stop working,” said Fotheringay, “they’ll kill us.”

“They can’t kill us all,” answered Milo. “Like I said: They need us.”

“They only have to kill a few of us, is the idea,” said Yoko Jones, “and then the rest of us will chicken out and go back to work. Right?”

“Wrong,” said Milo. “Because we won’t be afraid.”

“The thing is,” said Fotheringay, “I rather think we will be afraid.”

Milo pointed at the fire with one hand and at the sea with the other.

“We take our own lives by the score!” he shouted. “We’re already poisoned, already sick, already half dead! How many of you are thinking about walking into the ocean right now? Raise your hands.”

No one.

Then one hand.

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

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

He raised his hand, too.

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

Silence again. The hands went down.

One hand went back up. Gilgamesh.

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

More hands followed.

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

He sat down on the beach and meditated.

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

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

—

The next day, he climbed up to the pump.

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

Two of the engineers had painted their faces like skulls.

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

—

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

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

Just a little bit.

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

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

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

But she joined them in meditating on the beach afterward.

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

“Me, too,” said Milo.

—

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

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

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

The cartel was still mad about their lost ship.

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

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

So was the watcher, a little boy named Marcus.

—

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” said Milo. “Go fishing.”

—

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

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

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

Some of them drowned.

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dammit,” Milo whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

The Monitors were having a conference by their spacecraft now.

Crackle, crackle, crackle.

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

But they didn’t.

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

The Hospital Committee rushed to help Jones and Noonguesser.

“What now?” asked Suzie.

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

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

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

—

The silent treatment could work both ways, Milo discovered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

She was right.

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

Suzie sat beside him, doing the same thing.

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

He looked.

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

Parts from the cartel’s precious pump.

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

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

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

“Easy,” Suzie answered. “It’s blood.”

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Family Stone made forgiving noises.

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

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

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

—

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

Which they did.

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

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

The soldiers boomed and crackled and waved their burp guns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They pretended not to be watching it.

Most of them pretended not to be afraid.

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

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

“Me, too,” said a lot of people.

Milo noticed the bomb getting bright around the edges.

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

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

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

“I think about getting old,” said Suzie.

“Food,” said someone else.

“The alphabet.”

“Making love.”

“My missing eye.”

“My kids back on Ganymede.”

“Music.”

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

Now? Now?

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

Now?

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

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

And it worked, in a way.

There never was such a moment, after all. If you were supposed to be in the moment, this was the one, all right. There was this one idea going out to all the people on all the planets that maybe you couldn’t get people to stop being predators, but you could get them to stop being prey. That from now on there would be this great big peaceful future, and either it was going to be or not be, depending on what people did with this one moment, the whole future waiting on this one breathless moment, like an elephant on the head of a pin. Maybe things will change after this, and we can all stop living the same idiotic greedy mistakes over and over, lifetime after lifetime, and finally evolve into the kind of people who insist on living well—

“No, no!” you growl, because even though these are worthy thoughts, they are not meditating, and just this one damn time—

But it can’t be helped, because it’s not just your head, is it? It’s the head and soul of all the voices of all your ten thousand lives and eight thousand years and all their pasts and futures, all the cavemen and race-car drivers and milkmaids with pale cheeks, all the spacemen, crickets, economists, and witches. The voices are full of the things people are full of, the things they will carry with them into whatever future takes shape, things like waffles and hard work and things you hope no one finds out. Things you fear, and things that defeat you, like spiders and children and forgetting to set the clock. Gothic shadows like the Hook Man, escaped and haunting the woods. Things like barbarians and taxes and red and blue lights in the rearview mirror and the feeling that’s always there, like a haunting, the most human thing of all: the feeling you forgot something, forgot something, left something undone. The voices in your head, your thousands of years and lives, talk about Perfections you have known, like the time you were catapulted over the walls at Vienna, the time you left the first footprint on the moon, the time you dove in and saved Stacey Crabtree’s little girl from drowning, the time you played a violin note that broke the stained glass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Troy, Michigan. The voices talk about the masks you wear, like the wife mask and the husband mask and the mask where you pretend you know what you’re doing and the festival mask and the masks of ennui and joy. They talk about the thing behind the mask, the greatest and most mysterious thing of all, the source and object of all fears and hates and lives, the last thing we see and know before we die, which ties it all up in a nice glowing bow of Knowing, and Silence, and Peace.

Except it hardly ever works that way, including Now, and you look at Suzie and she looks at you in those moments before the great big thing happens and the end comes, and you kind of fall together, laughing at each other for trying to be so serious, laughing for the same reason you do most things, which is a reason you still don’t know, and neither do wise men, moo cows, or Death.