They showed him reaching out with swollen, frozen hands, stopping the old man and the man-woman. Leaving them behind, slowly turning, softly glowing.
The pictures showed Milo sidestepping—still conscious, mind you!—across five yards of airless space and tugging the troll back with him. Pulling himself into the air lock—clinching the win!—and then pulling all of his rivals in behind him. Then the air lock slammed closed, and that was the end of the prison news, which looped right back to the beginning.
“Who and what is Milo Hay?” inmates were asking, all over Unferth.
“Who is he?” asked the groups and crowds and individual cons who started crowding the passages outside Thomas’s cliff dwelling. “Where is he?”
“He’s at the fucking hospital!” yelled Thomas, who didn’t like getting his picture taken, and threw rocks at them. “Where would you be if you spent a whole minute dicking around in outer space in your birthday suit?”
—
Milo was not at the hospital.
The other divers went straight there, of course, as always, with varying degrees of damage. They survived, with the exception of the old man, who tried to hold his breath, when he should have known better, and died of a shredded lung.
Milo, to everyone’s astonishment, had staggered out of the air lock, blinked a few bloody tears out of his remaining natural eye, and looked around for his owners.
Gob and Thomas stood shaking their heads. They acted as if they wanted to slap Milo’s back but thought he might be fragile.
“I don’t know what I just saw,” said Thomas.
Arabeth said nothing. She herded the sportswriters out of the room and followed them down the hall.
“I think I’ve earned a share,” Milo had the nerve to tell Gob.
“You got a date with Seagram, is all,” said Gob.
—
So that’s where Milo was.
Seagram’s place was a laboratory and a studio and a shop. It was like hanging out in a museum. Over here, racks of sheet-metal plates. Over there, lenses and microscopes and actual computers. Seagram even had a handmade fish that followed him around, hovering over his shoulder. No one else in Unferth had a fish, not that Milo had seen.
Seagram served something like wine in tin cups and cooked something like real food. It looked like chicken and tasted like pork.
“What is this?” Milo asked. “It’s like real meat.”
“You know what it is,” answered Seagram.
Yeah. Milo knew. There was only one kind of animal in Unferth.
He was hungry. Screw it. He ate.
—
After dinner, Milo was grudgingly pleased to discover that Seagram possessed an actual mattress (in Unferth, just like everywhere else, the money was in resources and technology). He was also relieved when Seagram turned out to be gentle, even kind. That was a first since his arrival.
Still. All that lumpy, burned skin…
It’s just flesh and bones, said his old soul. Let it go.
“You’re a telepath,” said Seagram, after.
They lay on Seagram’s mattress, side by side, watching shadows on the stone ceiling.
“Telepath?” asked Milo.
“Telekinetic, too, obviously. I suspected it when I wired your eye. Psychic brains are folded differently. Have you always been able to do…what you did?”
“When I was little,” Milo said, “I could float things. But then I got in some trouble, and—”
“They stuck a mole on you,” finished Seagram. “They’d have done the same thing before they sent you here, too, if they’d thought you had the talent. You might have gone into remission with it, but it’s back. Big-time. My wild guess is that your brain got desperate and gave your talents a jumpstart. That happens; people get in an accident or bump their heads or have an intense emotional experience, and—whammo!—they wake up able to do and see things they couldn’t before. Whether you meant to or not, you controlled your circulation to slow your oxygen consumption. Maybe even propelled yourself through space. The video doesn’t lie.”
Seagram rolled onto his side and stroked Milo’s shoulder. Milo recoiled.
Seagram backed off. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to,” he said.
Milo glared at Seagram, his red eye zooming in and out.
“I don’t want to!” he shouted. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
Seagram looked hurt.
“I’m sorry,” said Milo. “I’m not…I don’t like men that way.”
Seagram rolled out of bed and wrapped a robe around his fat self.
“It’s okay,” he said, busying himself at one of his benches. “I didn’t, either, before. But you will eventually, probably. Most do.”
“Well, not me.”
“That’s fine, Milo. Go to sleep.”
It was the first time in Unferth he’d been called by his name.
—
The next day, Seagram gave him clothes to wear. Just a simple burlap shirt with no sleeves and short pants with a length of twine for a belt.
“People are looking for you everywhere,” he said, after a breakfast of cold leftovers.
“If I talked to them,” said Milo, “what would I say?”
“I wouldn’t tell them the truth. It’ll scare them. Just go back to Thomas and let him figure out how to keep them away from the door.”
Milo’s brow furrowed. “Go back now? I thought I was staying here for a week,” he said. “Is it because I don’t—”
“No, no. I’ll give Thomas a good report on you; don’t worry. I just don’t feel well. It happens. I get headaches.”
Milo didn’t want to go back to Thomas. His rectum tightened at the thought.
“Listen,” he said. “Let me try something.”
“Try what?” Seagram’s eyes narrowed.
“Trust me.”
Seagram said, “Boy, if you’re thinking of stabbing me, you should know: It’s damn hard to kill a fat man—” But then he stopped talking. Some thought or feeling seemed to catch up with him, and he said, “All right. What?”
“Close your eyes.”
Seagram closed his eyes, and Milo walked around the table, stepped up behind him, and put both hands on Seagram’s great, fat head.
If he could make himself space-proof by accident, maybe he could make Seagram feel better. How? He didn’t know. He closed his own eyes.
A “nothing” feeling, for a moment, and then something like holding an ocean between his hands. Something warm and full, with electric tides.
Seagram’s self.
It was a vast thing, a dreaming strangeness, a boa very much like his own, but different. Older. Deep with memories.
Pain.
The longer Milo held Seagram, this other self, in his hands and his mind, the more it became like a weight. Here was a soul that had been wronged and hurt until it was in danger of becoming a mere creature.
Milo heard himself gasp aloud under it. Like his own pain, he sensed, it was something you could get lost in. He remembered that he had done this for a reason, taken hold of Seagram for a reason. He felt himself peeling back shadow and distractions and illusions, until it seemed to him that he found something that was simple and human.
A door. A door in the dark sea bottom, where something of value had been forgotten and locked away.
Milo opened the door and light spilled out. He felt it in his hands, saw it inside his own mind.