He zoomed in with his mechanical eye, watching the ship fire thrusters, slowing down.
It had been a while. He wondered what sort of criminal they were dropping off. Whoever they were, they were in for a nice surprise. He gave his rope a tug, drifted back to the hatch, and made his holy way back to the garden. Soon enough, they’d come to tell him about the newcomer.
The door to the garden opened up, and two uniformed officials stepped in.
He saw them speak with Thomas and saw Thomas point down the rows of radishes, lettuce, and corn. Saw them walk in his direction, so he met them halfway, among the pumpkins.
A man and a woman, wearing court badges from Bridger’s Planet.
“Are you Milo Hay?” asked the man.
“I am,” he said.
How strange to hear his common name. For months now they’d been calling him “The Milo.”
The woman beamed at him and said, “We’re here to take you home.”
—
They had a hard time explaining to him that Ally Shepard had finally done enough weird and not very nice things to convince her family to send her to the hospital. There, they decided that she was a victim of a rare dissociative disorder that made it nearly impossible for her to distinguish between right and wrong. The thing that had finally gotten her family’s attention was that she gathered up a group of children from the park and took them on a “field trip” to a construction site, where one of the children was slightly bulldozed, escaping with bruises.
Under observation, she admitted that Milo Hay had not raped her one bit and that she was so sorry he was in prison now and probably dead, and when could she go home?
None of this could be explained to Milo while he was leaping over garden tables, trying to get away. He might have made it, possibly, but they threw stun whips around his head and dragged his unconscious, holy self back out of the garden.
Stun whips did it for his disciples, too. Even Gob.
Milo woke up, somewhat, out in the corridor and was fully awake by the time they reached the ready room. He screamed, crying and grabbing at things, scraping his hands bloody, before they were finally able to stuff him through the hatch and aboard their ship. With a thunk! and a hiiiii-iiiii-iiiii-isssss-sssss-ss! and a flare of mighty engines, they carried him across hyperspace, home.
—
His parents were no big help.
They understood that their son had been the victim of a terrible injustice, but now that he was home, he might as well give it all to the universe and its crazy God and let it go.
“I call it ‘Random Value Shift,’?” his father explained. “It’s how a professor of zoology with five PhDs gets eaten by a tiger in the jungle. Doesn’t matter who you are; things will happen to you. It’s one of the primary tenets of divine allegory.”
Milo didn’t give a shit. Nobody cares less about theology than a god.
His parents didn’t understand why their brilliant, once-ambitious son was now content to waste away in front of the living-room window, talking to himself. Or why he got up at night to go stand in the backyard, naked.
He barely spoke. He barely breathed. The only time they were 100 percent sure he hadn’t died was when they took him to the hospital and he screamed while they removed his holy eye.
—
His old soul was in shock. All the memories of all his past lives couldn’t begin to understand what it must be like to be torn away from Unferth and his disciples and brought back to this small, silly place where he was a kid too young, still, for a driver’s license.
Milo, said his ancient soul, his old self: Understand it and accept it. This is small behavior. Overcome it.
Milo ignored the old voices. He tried to shut them up in their own little room, at the bottom of his mental sea, but none of that happy brain magic was working since they’d hit him with the stun whips.
It was like being amputated from himself.
—
After a year, he made an effort.
He tried until he was thirty years old. For fourteen years, he dragged himself through the trivia and the dullness of normal, everyday life. It was like trying to run a marathon race without legs.
He finished college with a C average.
He found that if he drank, he could be social, in a way. Could stand to sit in a room with people and listen to them babble. So he drank.
He got a job going to people’s houses and fixing things. Complicated electrical or nuclear devices. The work occupied him just enough to keep him awake, and it was not necessary that he talk to anyone very much.
At home in the evenings, he watched shows on his fish or on the wall unit until they put him to sleep. Sometimes he would buy marijuana. These things became a respirator for his soul.
—
Quite often, he found himself remembering a certain night in Unferth when he struggled with his memories of home.
To have nice, useless, distracting memories, or not to have them? He faced the same problem now. He reminded himself to be distracted, and imperfect, and human.
He was supposed to accomplish something, wasn’t he? Let alone saving the minds and souls of prisoners. What had happened to Lord Byron, the poet he was going to be? Or at least the professor he might have been?
He sprawled in a dull gray armchair. Here was what Napoleon might have been, if the army hadn’t worked out for him.
Milo put his hands on his head and tried to move neurochemicals around, but it was like searching an empty shoe box.
—
One day when Milo was thirty, Ally Shepard came to see him.
Ally was well. She was an associate professor of dramatic literature. One tiny phase-wave tweak to her cerebrum had put an end to being crazy and doing odd, inappropriate things.
She was happy, except for one thing. It agonized her, what had happened, long ago with Milo.
She knocked at his apartment door. This wouldn’t have worked, normally. Milo didn’t answer his door or his fish. But he came walking up the stairs just then, carrying a bag of groceries, including a twenty-ounce clamshell package of dope. He stopped on the top step when he saw her there.
“Ally,” he said.
(Milo, whispered his sleepy, long-ignored ancient self. Do this right….)
“Milo. You look good.”
And damned if he didn’t rise to the occasion. Maybe because it wasn’t a small, tedious thing. It was a big thing.
He invited her in, and made dinner for them both, and got them both high. And when she lost her cool and dissolved in tears, trying to apologize and make up for all that trauma with mere words, he held her and let her apologize.
“Ally,” he said, “you don’t need to worry about that. You were sick. And you made it right. And besides, I enjoyed it, to say the least.”
Ally went home much improved.
—