He knew thousands of ordinary loves, the sort that grind out years like sausage.
He knew the love of family and good friends. He loved things like beaches and rain and well-made clocks. He knew what it was like to watch love flake away and die and leave you feeling as if you’d been eaten by wild pigs.
—
Once, in eighteenth-century Zambia, love saved Milo’s life. The love of an entire village. The love of hundreds of people.
What happened was that Milo had a string of bad luck. Poor farming, drought, a snakebite, his mother died, a toothache, his house burned down with all his tools and possessions. Broke, tool-less, and too proud to ask for help, he became angrier and angrier, until one day he followed a wealthy man into the forest and beat him and took his money.
It was a small village, so of course he was identified. Some constables came and got him and brought him to the schoolhouse to face trial.
In many villages, Milo might have been beheaded or had his hands chopped off. But villages are all different, in one way or another, and Milo’s village had an advanced idea of what a trial was supposed to be like.
An odd kind of trial (it was an odd kind of village).
What they did was love him.
How they loved him was that a couple of hundred people spent hours reminding him what a good person he was. They reminded him of how, when he was a teenager, he had saved a small child from a hyena, taking the brunt of the hyena’s attack upon himself. The child was in her twenties now. She touched the deep scars on Milo’s arm and spoke softly to him.
They reminded him that he had once walked to the Congo and back, just to visit his grandfather. He had worked on a highway crew for four years so that his younger brother could go to university and become an engineer. He refused to kill animals, even rats and snakes and spiders. He had also married the ugliest woman in the village, because he saw past the outside and romanced her heart, but no one said this aloud. The wife herself was there and reminded him how he sometimes got up early and did her chores for her, so that she might have time to herself.
When the villagers were finished, their love had untwisted the angry knot that had formed in Milo’s head and soul, and they made him remember that he was good. And he went on his way and lived his life and was grateful. In time, with hard work, his luck changed, and he lived until he died.
—
He was a man named Owen who loved a man named Brad, in the Gayborhood section of Houston. They lived together in a small apartment and had a dog named Maggie. They lived together for fifteen years, until Maggie died and Brad was offered a dream job that took him to Switzerland. The choice was agonizing. It aged them.
—
He was a woman named Oko whose husband drowned in a sea battle. She became a famous widow, setting a place for her husband at the table every night. She waited for him on the rocks by the sea. At first she looked for his ship on the horizon. Then, as time passed, in the water itself, as if he had passed from one world, the world of having a body with arms and legs and hair and teeth, into another, the world of having the Earth itself for a body. Streams and currents were his arms. Storms were his voice. The moon and constellations were his changing thoughts and moods.
He had not been a handsome man. Sometimes she saw a fish that wore his face.
IOWA, 2025
High summer.
Blue sky above and green corn below.
In the middle of the green, four silver ARK ships, each the size of an ocean tanker, lay waiting on the grass, their noses lifted into the soft wind. Depending on where you stood, the ships reflected either the sun or the grass and corn.
It was, thought Milo, standing miles away, near the fence at the ARK perimeter, as if each ship were a world trapped in a mirror.
He eyed the chain-link fence behind him, ten feet high and topped with razor wire. He traced its gray length across the hills, a rough circle maybe sixty miles in circumference. How useful would the fence be, really, if they came? There would be thousands of them, and they’d be angry.
How else could you expect them to feel, when they knew they were all about to die?
—
It had begun, five years earlier, with the Disappearances.
Scientists and engineers.
Just a few at first. They were not famous people, and their disappearances rarely made the news. There was enough going on in the news already, in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Everything the scientists had warned people about was happening all at once.
The seas were rising. The oceans had died, from plankton right up the food chain. The water tables had gone toxic. Computer viruses formed networks that shut down the Internet at least once a week.
A few vanishing eggheads didn’t seem like a big deal.
The Disappearances caught Milo’s attention when they started happening at Stanford, where he worked. Melinda Warnstein-Keppler, the electronics guru, vanished from her apartment, leaving dinner in the microwave. Zhou Chen-Barnhart, the builder of the orbital neutrino collector, was next, then Claudine Fraas, the Nobel laureate author of Problems in Holographic Relativity.
Milo didn’t worry about disappearing, himself. He was a research assistant. An information-science gunslinger, but he would never be a giant. He worked for the giants and was honored to do so. They were all, in their way, trying to save the world, back when they still thought it could be saved.
Milo had come to science in a way that was both usual and unusual. Like most science-worshippers, he was curious. There was nothing he didn’t want to know, and this made him absorb books and computer links the way other kids absorbed loud music. That was the ordinary part. The extraordinary part was why he wanted so badly to understand how the world worked (and how time worked, and space, and life and death).
He heard voices in his head.
Not the voices of schizophrenia but voices that seemed to be from the past. Other lives he had lived. Memories spanning thousands of years. Information that came to him out of nowhere, because he had once lived in Japan or had once been an Egyptian mathematician.
Hell, maybe he was schizophrenic. Maybe he had a brain tumor.
(You don’t have a brain tumor, a voice told him. A former doctor.)
He wound up working for Wayne Aldrin, the rock star of Systems Integration Science. At twenty-five, Aldrin had published It’s Only an Island if You Look at It from the Water, a treatise that revolutionized problem solving. At thirty, he had developed a food plant that would thrive in toxic earth; it broke down poisons, cleaned the soil, and dropped fruit that was basically a big yellow multivitamin. It could have fed half the world, Milo had heard, except that it would have cost the wrong people a lot of money.