The soldiers boomed and crackled and waved their burp guns.
Milo almost wished they would shoot. Noonguesser had gotten every one of the fish activated, and five of them were in the woods now, filming.
But the goons all got back aboard their spacecraft and left the island and circled far away.
Overhead, the inside-out bomb made some eerie noises.
Okay, thought Milo. This was being filmed, too. Not just here but far out at sea.
Ten miles out—that was his plan—the Fish Committee was supposed to have left their outriggers spread out and sea-anchored. They were supposed to be treading water, and five of them were supposed to be filming. Filming the fleet, filming the island, filming anything big and awful that might happen.
But here was where Milo’s plan differed from what everyone else wanted to do.
The Fish Committee, since his big speech, since the Parable of Jonathan Yah Yah, included nearly everyone. Milo’s plan was for nearly everyone to leave the island aboard the outriggers, film whatever happened to the island, and broadcast it in one military-priority burst, reaching everywhere from Venus to the Neptune ammonia mines. Then they were to survive. To dive and swim if they had to, avoiding the fleet, and going on to live their lives.
That morning, however, the Fish Committee had told him no.
“No,” said Jale, whose hair had gone white since Chili’s murder. “Are we dead or aren’t we?”
“We are,” they all said, the whole Family Stone.
In the end, it was mostly the children who took the outriggers out. They could work the fish as well as grown-ups and hit SEND when the time came. They could sail and dive and swim and had a lot of years to look forward to, if things changed.
If people under the cartel thumb, from Venus to the Neptune ammonia mines, heard the Parable of Jonathan Yah Yah and learned about being dead.
“Because they’re the Family Stone, too,” Carver said as they formed a circle. “We refused to accept the cartel rules; it’s why we’re here. But we’re not the only ones. There’re others like us everywhere, and they’ll know what to do when they see what happens on this island. When they see this thing of beauty the cartel has built for them.”
Christopher Noonguesser was with the children, out there hiding among the waves. So was Old Deuteronomy. If they survived, they would help explain what had gone on here.
Most of them, though, stood right here under the bomb.
They pretended not to be watching it.
Most of them pretended not to be afraid.
“Milo?” said Fotheringay. “I’m afraid.”
“I was trying to meditate,” said a man named Wild Bill. “But I keep thinking about that fucking bomb.”
“Me, too,” said a lot of people.
Milo noticed the bomb getting bright around the edges.
“I’ve always sucked at meditating,” Milo said. “Sometimes I can’t think of anything but cats.”
“I always have to go to the bathroom,” said Calypso.
“I think about not thinking about things,” said Yoko Jones. “I can’t help it.”
“I think about getting old,” said Suzie.
“Food,” said someone else.
“The alphabet.”
“Making love.”
“My missing eye.”
“My kids back on Ganymede.”
“Music.”
After that, they didn’t talk anymore. The moment was simply too busy, too heavy.
Now? Now?
Would it hurt? Would they burn like stars or just end suddenly?
Now?
If you were Sir St. John Fotheringay, you began doing a little dance at this point. If you were Yoko Jones, you tried to hum in perfect sync with the Everything.
If you were Milo, at that point, you decided that these last moments were the perfect time to finally meditate for real, and you looked straight into Suzie’s eyes and your eyes locked and you meditated together.
And it worked, in a way.
There never was such a moment, after all. If you were supposed to be in the moment, this was the one, all right. There was this one idea going out to all the people on all the planets that maybe you couldn’t get people to stop being predators, but you could get them to stop being prey. That from now on there would be this great big peaceful future, and either it was going to be or not be, depending on what people did with this one moment, the whole future waiting on this one breathless moment, like an elephant on the head of a pin. Maybe things will change after this, and we can all stop living the same idiotic greedy mistakes over and over, lifetime after lifetime, and finally evolve into the kind of people who insist on living well— “No, no!” you growl, because even though these are worthy thoughts, they are not meditating, and just this one damn time— But it can’t be helped, because it’s not just your head, is it? It’s the head and soul of all the voices of all your ten thousand lives and eight thousand years and all their pasts and futures, all the cavemen and race-car drivers and milkmaids with pale cheeks, all the spacemen, crickets, economists, and witches. The voices are full of the things people are full of, the things they will carry with them into whatever future takes shape, things like waffles and hard work and things you hope no one finds out. Things you fear, and things that defeat you, like spiders and children and forgetting to set the clock. Gothic shadows like the Hook Man, escaped and haunting the woods. Things like barbarians and taxes and red and blue lights in the rearview mirror and the feeling that’s always there, like a haunting, the most human thing of all: the feeling you forgot something, forgot something, left something undone. The voices in your head, your thousands of years and lives, talk about Perfections you have known, like the time you were catapulted over the walls at Vienna, the time you left the first footprint on the moon, the time you dove in and saved Stacey Crabtree’s little girl from drowning, the time you played a violin note that broke the stained glass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Troy, Michigan. The voices talk about the masks you wear, like the wife mask and the husband mask and the mask where you pretend you know what you’re doing and the festival mask and the masks of ennui and joy. They talk about the thing behind the mask, the greatest and most mysterious thing of all, the source and object of all fears and hates and lives, the last thing we see and know before we die, which ties it all up in a nice glowing bow of Knowing, and Silence, and Peace.
Except it hardly ever works that way, including Now, and you look at Suzie and she looks at you in those moments before the great big thing happens and the end comes, and you kind of fall together, laughing at each other for trying to be so serious, laughing for the same reason you do most things, which is a reason you still don’t know, and neither do wise men, moo cows, or Death.
They did not wake up beside the river.
As Milo’s soul memory came flooding back, he realized that this was unusual and a bad sign. He remembered waking up in the well last time.
No flowers, and no sunshine.
Just dark.