They sat attentively through a brief talk by Thomas and Seagram. They even applauded testimonials from Gob and the naked turban man. But that didn’t mean they’d learned anything.
“We live the way we live,” said a man with a 100 percent–tattooed body, “because it works for us. The strong eat the weak. It’s natural.”
Murmuring. The crowd liked that.
“Yeah,” said Seagram. “But is that really working for you? Are you happy?”
“Is your mother a whore?” asked the tattooed man.
Laughter.
“Let me show you,” said Milo, advancing toward the man. “Maybe if you all saw—”
A small rock bounced off his shoulder.
“Ow!” he yelped. “Seriously?”
The assembled convicts moved in a single wave. They didn’t know what they wanted to do, but they felt threatened and wanted to do something.
“Let’s go,” said Milo, turning to his confederates. “Let’s go now.”
They might not have made it, except for Gob. The giant lifted people out of the way, and Thomas followed, throwing punches. Seagram waddled along, concentrating on protecting his own fat head. And Milo came last, every now and then shouting, “Off!” and people would back off long enough for them to get past.
They left the city and fled up corridors, working their way toward the surface. Some of the crowd lost interest; others kept following and throwing things.
“They want me,” Milo huffed. “Let them follow me. You guys take off down this next—here! Go that way! We’ll meet at Seagram’s tonight!”
“No!” yelled Thomas. “We’ll stay together and think—”
“Gob,” said Milo.
Gob grabbed Thomas and ran off the way Milo pointed, with Seagram following.
Milo turned left into the space divers’ ready room and threw himself bodily at the controls. The hatch opened. He took a minute, hyperventilating, soaking his body with oxygen, until he heard footsteps and shouting in the ready room itself.
Then he stepped into the air lock, shouted his lungs empty, and told the door to open.
Scraaaaaaape…psssss-sssss-sssss-sssss-sst!
The remaining pressurized air shot Milo into space, across the rocky surface.
And he swelled somewhat. And became cold and numb. Became fizzy and full and uncomfortable, as if his whole body wanted to sneeze but couldn’t.
But he slowed it all down, all his flowing and exchanging and burning. Slowed it down until he felt sleepy but not faint.
Then he got his feet under him in the light surface gravity and walked back to the hatch and the window and gazed calmly in at the mob, crushing and shrieking on the opposite side.
He tried to understand them. He tried to love them.
Good, said his old self.
He closed his eyes and meditated for a few seconds. Then he turned and loped away, out of their sight, across the broad, stony landscape that was almost totally dark, except as it was lit, just faintly, by the slowly turning firestorm of the stars.
—
He ran for a mile or more before choosing a hatch and imagining that it opened.
It opened.
—
When he reached Seagram’s later that night, his friends were waiting for him. Thomas looked a bit sulky.
And there were others. Milo recognized faces from the mob that had chased him, the mob that had seen him stroll away into space. There were ten of them, maybe. It was a start.
“You obviously know something we don’t,” said the man with the 100 percent–tattooed body.
—
Six months passed and found Milo living in a protein garden.
It was like a garden anywhere else in the galaxy, on a planet or in a greenhouse up in orbit. There were growing things, and not just slime. They had found ways to grind stone and waste into soil. They had engineered artificial seeds and built banks of blue-light generators.
Most people were smart, if you gave them time and peace of mind.
If you gave them a world where people weren’t terrified all the time, or angry.
The garden didn’t have a sky. It had stone. It didn’t have fresh smells and breezes. It had mildew and damp, the breath of caves and people. Milo and his first disciples tended the garden.
Everyone had jobs, and this was theirs. Milo planted and harvested. Gob maintained the machinery. Seagram engineered things. Thomas sprayed things and watered things and made soil out of stone and shit and dead inmates.
And there were others, building schools. Others, making drawings and paintings and nice things to put here and there and make the walls look nice, because if it didn’t look like a prison, then maybe it wasn’t a prison, really.
Yes, said Milo’s old voices, which were getting more and more smug by the day.
When they came to him for teaching, they came to the garden and sat in a great circle and touched hands all around. And Milo would start it off, a wave of images and sensory suggestions, and the wave would pass through them all until they opened their eyes and found themselves on warm green grass under a blue sky with white clouds. And flowers and birds all around. For a while.
That was the teaching: this imaginary garden that they could take away with them and remember and dream about.
Sometimes he went out and walked among them. They always gaped when they saw him in the corridors and the cities, as if he were something that belonged in the afterlife, or at least in hydroponics. They didn’t mob him as he passed. They just touched his linen suit (they were making better clothes now) and felt blessed if he turned his red robot eye on them, this boy who had made them men and women.
He was always humble, at least on the outside. He took time to stop and talk, to tell jokes and be human. At first, he couldn’t stop thinking what a bunch of idiot scum they were and how he wished to God that some beautiful young women would commit crimes and get sent here to be his holy concubines. But he was getting better and kinder all the time, just like the rest of them. And he stopped thinking of them as low and dirty and dumb, especially when he saw the builders and designers and artists they became.
—
We’re going to make it this time, he thought he heard his ancient soul say.
Milo didn’t know quite what that meant, except for a deep sense that everything was perfect. That something wonderful was being achieved, just by letting things be the way they were supposed to be.
“Let it be,” he told his disciples and all his people.
“Let it be what?” they asked.
“Let it be perfect.”
“Oh,” they all said. “Okay.”
—
Sometimes he went to the space-diving air lock and let himself out. His favorite thing was to take off his clothes and tie a three-hundred-foot length of rope to a davit inside the air lock, and, instead of propelling himself across the surface, he would leap out into space with the rope fastened around his ankle and drift there for a time, his own self seeming to vanish into the starfield.
Soon, he was going out to the air lock every day. When he wasn’t inside cultivating the gardens or out being worshipped, he was floating in space, the most incomprehensibly happy life-form in the universe.
—
He was out there floating like that the day he saw the approaching cruiser.