Milo pointed at the fire with one hand and at the sea with the other.
“We take our own lives by the score!” he shouted. “We’re already poisoned, already sick, already half dead! How many of you are thinking about walking into the ocean right now? Raise your hands.”
No one.
Then one hand.
Then a hundred, and then everyone. Even the children.
Milo let them sit there like that with their hands raised. No one spoke.
He raised his hand, too.
“We are already dead,” he said. “Let’s make it count. Let’s create a world, a solar system, in which the following is true: If you put out your hand and try to bully people into serving you, those people will always choose not to serve. Very soon, no one will try that anymore. It would be like trying to juggle water.”
Silence again. The hands went down.
One hand went back up. Gilgamesh.
“I don’t get it,” said Gilgamesh. “In the story, are we the zombie guy or the Baron guy?”
More hands followed.
“Are we supposed to be ready to die for real or, like, metaphorically?”
“Is the woman in the story supposed to represent freedom? Or is it a sex thing?”
“Does that paint itch? It looks like it itches.”
Milo closed his eyes. He backed away, out of the firelight.
—
The next morning, he walked down to the beach and helped push the fishing outriggers into the surf. He wore a fresh coat of black and a fresh coat of bones.
“Good weather!” he wished them, “And tons of fish!”
“Thanks!” yelled Jale as they slipped away, raising sail.
Jale had drawn a bone on one arm, he saw. Good.
He sat down on the beach and meditated.
He thought about spiders, for some reason. He couldn’t help it.
The twins joined him, wearing complete skeleton paint. Carlo had six hundred arm bones and an extra eye.
—
The next day, he climbed up to the pump.
He wore a special greasy variety of the skeleton paint, because someone was needed to dive down into the well and jar the drill head loose again.
Two of the engineers had painted their faces like skulls.
The dive he made that day was deeper than any he’d ever attempted. By the time he resurfaced, he was blue. You could see it through the paint.
—
The next day, he walked the forest with members of the Food-Safety Committee to taste-test a new kind of banana the soil had begun sprouting.
Two of them, Sage and Nosferatu, wore skeleton paint. The three of them walked together, searched the trees together, and, when the committee found what they were looking for, it was the three of them who volunteered to taste a little bit.
Just a little bit.
Before he even got his banana peeled, Milo’s fingers blistered.
Nosferatu had no reaction, but he dropped his banana the second he saw Milo’s fingers.
Sage lost an eye. A tumor swelled up in her eye socket and just—pop!—burst her eye.
But she joined them in meditating on the beach afterward.
“I can’t do it,” she complained. “I keep thinking about my eye.”
“Me, too,” said Milo.
—
The next day, the whole Food-Safety Committee wore skeleton paint. So did a lot of others. Maybe fifty. Some accessorized with dry leaves and sticks. Milo saw green skeletons, yellow skeletons, blue skeletons. No red. It was hard to make red.
Milo was thinking about making another speech, when something awful happened.
He and sixty other people were sitting on the beach pretending to meditate when something bristly and silver came tearing out of the sky. It raced for the island, guns flashing, and then thundered straight back into space.
The cartel was still mad about their lost ship.
Most of the islanders ran uphill along the coast, to see if the tsunami drum was all right.
It was not. It was blasted in two and burning.
So was the watcher, a little boy named Marcus.
—
The next day, the entire Family Stone came out in skeleton makeup.
They were waiting outside Milo’s tent when he woke up. All of them, in a big semicircle, weaving in and out among the huts, all the way down to the beach.
They waited in total silence. The only sound was the wind in the lovely, deadly trees and the constant sigh of the ocean.
Finally, it was Sir St. John Fotheringay—in blue skeleton paint—who cleared his throat.
“Was there something in particular,” he said, “that you wanted us to do?”
“Yes,” said Milo. “Go fishing.”
—
They went fishing. All of them. Instead of doing their cartel work.
It took them two weeks to build enough outriggers to carry them all. But every day they went to the forest and cut trees. Afterward, they practiced breathing. They meditated. Even if they couldn’t quiet their minds all the way, they learned to control their breath and their rhythms.
They swam out to sea and practiced diving. Deeper and deeper every day.
Some of them drowned.
“Jennadots,” Jale intoned, by the fire at night. “Holly Timm, Mrs. Jones, Axelrod, and Fantasia.”
Finally, they put out to sea. The whole Family Stone. And they stayed there for an entire week and rode the sea and ate like kings.
—
Milo was pretty sure they’d find the cartel waiting for them when they got back. But they didn’t.
The cartel had been there, all right. They had burned the village to atoms.
The Family Stone didn’t even talk about it. They sailed around the island and found a better beach. The Rebuilding Committee gathered wood and leaves for huts. The Tsunami Committee commissioned a new drum and new catamarans.
Everyone kept busy, either preserving fish or cooking fish or building something or searching for vegetables, or teaching or learning or watching for giant waves. And they were happy doing it, more or less.
“The blue skeleton paint itches,” Suzie complained to Milo. She had made her own blue paint out of raspberry juice, mud, and something like a lemon.
“Don’t use it anymore,” Milo advised. He kept waiting for the stupid paint to start raising tumors and killing people. But that was his only needling concern. Other than that, things were as they should be.
That was the status of the Family Stone when the cartel came scorching down with two heavies full of Monitors, bellowing over their loudspeakers.
—
Milo tried to stay busy doing his work, winding leafy fibers into thread for fishing nets, but he had a hell of a time not watching the goons out of the corner of his eye.
They gathered in a cluster, like they always did, burp guns at their chests, obviously expecting the Family Stone to line up. They looked silly, standing in their little knot, being ignored.
Eventually they approached the first islander in sight: Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jones was filleting redfish and hanging the fillets to dry on a crude wooden rack. He was decked out in blue skeleton paint and scratching himself when the Monitors walked up.
Milo couldn’t hear what was said, but he could imagine.
“Why the hell aren’t you moon niggers lined up?” the Monitors would ask.