Something awful was happening to his eyes. They were getting foggy, fast!
The other hatch…He looked where he’d been told, and there it was. How far away?
(Swelling all over, like rising bread. Inside, he fizzed like soda pop…)
Gripping the edges of the hatch, he pulled with his arms and pushed with his legs and shot himself through the dark, toward that light.
His eyes blurred. He was almost blind.
No sense of movement. Nothing.
(Except an agony of swelling, volcanic cold, fizzing—————-—————-—————-—————)
—
Unbelievably, he woke up.
How could he still be alive? He wasn’t too happy about it, frankly.
First he became aware of pain. As if he’d been sunburned inside and out.
He still couldn’t see.
Voices came to him, as if from the bottom of a tin can.
“You probably feel sunburned,” said a female voice. The woman with the blue eyes.
“You look like shit,” said another voice. Thomas.
“You’re not sunburned,” said the woman. “There’s no star nearby, so you don’t have to worry about radiation. Now, what is my name?”
“Arabeth,” Milo grunted.
“Good, good. You did exactly the right thing,” said the woman. “Got yourself moving in the right direction, and your unconscious ass just sailed right into the open air lock. You’re not always going to be so lucky. Best work on staying awake.”
What? They wanted him to do this again?
His vision came back, a little at a time. Two vague forms squatted over him.
“Hardly anyone passes the test,” the woman told him. “Lucky boy. You’re going to be an athlete. For a little while, anyhow, until you die.”
—
They didn’t have much in the way of entertainment on Unferth, Thomas explained, back at their tiny home. They had fights, of course, and competitions to see who could swallow the most of such and such a chemical. But diving was the only true spectator sport.
It was basically a race. You put three or four naked people in an air lock and opened the door. They scrambled out, and the object was to be the one who went farthest before turning around and coming back. The winner was the one who went the greatest distance and made it back to the air lock alive.
“Almost every time,” said Thomas, while shitting into a bucket, “there’s at least one that doesn’t come back. They pass out and tumble away, or they start bleeding inside, or their eyes go out on them and they get lost and miss the hatch coming back.”
“I didn’t know you could put a person out in pure space,” said Milo, “without a spacesuit. I thought they’d get killed instantly.”
“People are tough,” said Thomas, wiping himself with a handful of burlap. “They can take just about anything for a little while.”
Prisoners, he explained, liked to place bets on the divers, with whatever they had to offer. Cloth. Labor. Food. Muscle. The divers themselves sometimes made money.
“What made you think I could do it?” Milo asked.
“Gob tried to hang you, and you lived. Your body knows how to hold on to oxygen, and your mind knows how to not panic. That woman, the one with the blue eyes? Arabeth? She’s the most famous space diver ever. She got rich enough to quit. Now she gets paid to run the games.”
“How rich do I have to get,” Milo asked, “before I don’t have to do it anymore?”
Thomas laughed.
“You’re not going to get rich at all,” he said, handing Milo a bowl of protein sludge.
“What do you mean? What do you mean I’m not going to get—”
“You belong to Gob and me. If you win, we get a cut. You get to live.”
Milo’s eyes stung. He flung his bowl across the room.
“I’m not your fucking slave!” he screamed.
Thomas struck like a snake. His fists cracked Milo’s head. In an instant, his full weight squatted on Milo’s chest.
“Yes, you are,” said Thomas. “Of course you are.”
Just to make his point, Thomas stayed there for at least twenty minutes. Long enough for Milo to have an asthma attack and pass out.
—
When he awoke the following morning, Milo’s first thought was that Thomas had stayed on top of him all night long, had fallen asleep, and was still there. He opened his eyes and tried to sit up but couldn’t.
“Thomas,” he wheezed. “You’ve got to let me up, let me breathe—”
But Thomas was behind him.
“Shut up,” he said, and cuffed Milo’s ear.
A great Halloween mask of a head, half metal, leaned over and peered down at him.
Gob.
And another face. A fat face, bald, with burn grafts and a metal skull patch, like Gob’s.
“This is Seagram,” rasped Gob. “He’s here to improve our investment.”
“Good morning, Milo,” said Seagram. “Do you know what this is?”
He held out something like a metal oyster, with a red ball in the middle of it and a tail made of braided copper wire.
Milo didn’t answer.
Seagram started to explain something, but Gob interrupted.
“It’s a bionic eye,” he said. “Give you a few more seconds of vision in space. Give you an edge.”
“Now, wait—” Milo gasped.
“We should at least get him drunk,” rumbled Thomas.
“Just get it done,” said Gob.
Oh, God! No way—
It happened fast. Someone pried his right eyelid wide. Someone dumped home-brewed alcohol all over his face, and everything became a stinging blur.
Something like a fishhook stabbed his eye, yanked, and Milo felt his eyeball pop free.
He screamed, and Thomas pushed his jaw shut.
A knife scraped out his empty socket, way up inside his head.
Milo tried to make himself pass out, but no dice. He felt every slice and stab and insult as they worked wires into his brain. Lights flashed and fires raged and he heard a French horn, far away. Then they screwed the eye itself, the metal oyster, into his socket.
A red blur, a high-pitched whining, and there was Seagram’s fat, burned face in front of him. Reddish, but in good focus.
“Zoom in,” said Seagram.
The eye seemed to know what to do. Milo simply tried to look closer at the guy, and the image magnified. Blurred, focused.
Blurred again.
“Close your good eye when you do that,” said Gob.
“We done?” asked Seagram.
“We done,” answered Gob, releasing Milo.
Seagram stood over them, rubbing his jaw.
“He looks like he might win a few,” he said. “Instead of straight payment, can we talk shares?”
“No,” said Gob. “Straight barter.”
Barter?
“After the dive tomorrow,” Thomas told Milo, helping him sit up, “you’re going home with Seagram for a week. And he better tell me you were nice to him.”
Milo blinked. His new eye whizzed, zooming in on the floor.
Dive tomorrow?
—
He had tried, since his imprisonment, not to think about his other life, before.
He was completely unsuccessful. No matter how hard he tried to shape his intellect, to shut useless thoughts and memories away, they swam at him in dreams and walked his mind like ghosts when he was awake.