Black Pockets

by George Zebrowski

  He became silent. We walked around the still water of the lake, and it seemed that he had nothing left to fish out for me.

  “When things get to violence and terror,” he said softly, “there is no going back. Kill the terrorists, but fix the ills that made them. They got rid of us. I hope they fixed everything else, and that’s why they don’t want us back.”

  “What,” I asked, “what... did they do to you and Mom, exactly?”

  “Do you really want such pictures in your head?”

  “What was it about?” I asked instead.

  “Oh, patents, the research we did in physics and biology. The feuding corporations who wanted it got it out of us in secret and made us disappear. There is no limit to the imagination of the powerful.”

  “Did you tell them what they wanted?”

  He nodded and looked ashamed. “Then we became useless, so they locked us up on other kinds of charges. All over the world, there were jails filled with mistrusted research elites. Our knowledge was given to those of our colleagues who knew how to go along to get along. And we became a problem. So a position paper was made about our threat. We were too damaged to be released back into the population. And when the asteroid prison system was instituted, to make use of all the mined-out rocks orbiting the sun, we became prime candidates for removal. Oh, you should have heard the arguments, son. If we were not removed, we would not only pose a danger to others, but to ourselves. As with Andrew Jackson’s removal of the Indians in the nineteenth century, the rationale was that if we were not removed we would all be killed!” He shrugged. “Might have been some truth in that, both in Jackson’s time and in ours, given the fear that had been taught to the growing middle-class zoo.”

  He had told me about the Trail of Tears more than once. “Jackson was the president of the United States then,” I said, wanting to please him.

  “Good, you remember.” He stopped walking and looked at me.

  He was just as tall as I was, and when I looked into his eyes I saw that he was overcome with emotion and had lost his train of thought.

  Finally, he said, “We were tortured both physically and mentally—electrical inputs into mind and body. They jacked into our pain centers and later, as the means became available, into our frightened imaginations, and made us see the most terrible things being done to us, to your mother, many of them recorded from actual tortures that had been committed.” He smiled. “They soothed their consciences in this way, by telling us that our sufferings were only virtual, not real.”

  I shuddered at the realization that Mother had kept most of this to herself all these years.

  “So what now?” I asked, fearing the answer.

  “We may never be going back,” he said. “They’re rid of us for good.”

  “But it’s been fifty years,” I said.

  “They don’t want us to write histories. They’ve dumped us into the dark.” He smiled. “Try to understand that there weren’t right and wrong sides in any of this, though a lot of wrong, and even some good, was done. Proof is how easily human beings could pass from the poor and powerful and abuse their gains. It’s all people in the end. What’s interesting is that there was any talk of right and wrong, that anyone, secular or religious, felt there were such things as right and wrong.”

  “Are there?” I asked.

  “Yes, based on human needs and feelings...”

  It was getting harder to understand what he was saying. He was changing my view of him and the world we lived in, and I could only feel anxious about what he would say next.

  He saw my puzzled look and said, “Think of it this way. The world presents its ways to you. They are not what you grew up thinking they should be.”

  “Then where do you get ideas of how things should be?” I asked.

  “From the past, passed on surreptitiously. From theological notions of right and wrong. But there is only... the ways things are, the way they happen, with few of us guessing how they will happen, or what it will mean, until later. Morals, ideals, right and wrong, float around loose, and can only be applied by human beings.”

  “So what do you think now?” I asked. “About what you did, I mean.”

  “Nothing justifies killing,” he said in a suddenly strong voice. “Even self-defense and suicide are not perfect. When a human life is lost, an angle of self-aware nature... dies. A universe ends with the death of that finite viewpoint, and it’s irreparable.” He smiled. “And we, including the victims, can only mourn it in advance. Few others do later.”

  He was suddenly silent, leaving me even more puzzled. He seemed to be sorry for too much. Or there was too much evil for anyone to overcome.

  “But maybe something else happened,” I said, “something that doesn’t have anything to do with our planned return.”

  “How can we know, son? We can’t see out.”

  But of course we might see out, it occurred to me, if we could enter the engineering level. My imagination soared as I imagined breaking out of our inner landscape, into the level below, and looking outside.

  My father put his arm around my shoulders and said, “You’re twenty-one, but there is nothing for you to do, no way to help your mind to grow. Our return might have changed that, given you a whole new world. I wanted you to break out of all this.”

  He wanted me to break out of his past, I realized, wondering if he thought that it might have been better for me not to have been born; but the smile on his face as he held me said no. His unhealed wounds seemed to lose their grip on him only when he smiled at me.

  4

  By telling me about his past, about himself and Mom, my father was saying that I had grown up. For many of the other boys growing up meant they were no longer beaten, because they were too big and could hit back. Of course they fought among themselves, but that was more acceptable.

  My father never hit me. At least not that I could remember. My mother often slapped me before I was ten or eleven, but not often after that. I lied about it to my friends, so they wouldn’t think my parents were soft.

  You ask what kind of law we had. We lived in what my father described as a Spartan anarchy. There wasn’t much to steal. But people fought over women, over girls, over boys. We restrained our outbursts of violence with small police groups. These usually disbanded after each incident. Some people still managed to kill each other in private ways, but this usually ended when one or the other was killed. Vendettas were few, for lack of extensive familial networks. Most people left each other alone. They lived for talk at mealtimes, for their romances, for walking and swimming. There were suicides, mostly among the single and friendless. Things had been much worse when our population had been twice what it was at the time of our supposed return.

  There were two hundred and ten boys inside our rock, and about the same number of girls. Some of us, mostly boys, got together in groups and hiked all over, to the ends of the world and around the middle. The girls kept to themselves and close to their parents. Later I learned that these families were more like mine, with better treatment of their sons and daughters, or were trying to be better.

  Most of the kids were shy of each other. I think that was because there were so few of us compared to the adults. Right from when I started to become aware of myself, I knew that the adults carried another world inside their heads. Mostly they were silent about it, and why they were here; but their silence was loud, and became louder after some of their stories got out. All the stories I heard, including my father’s, fit together.

  After that first time, he started to tell me more, and more of his memory became my own. More and more he supplemented his subject, teaching what he knew of any subject, of course, with parts of his life story.

  My mother sometimes heard us, and began to join in. She started to cry when she told me how she felt when she knew that she had lost the Earth, and might never see it again. It was worse for her now that something had gone wrong with our return. My father left the past alone for a while after
that, and kept to the simple physics he was trying to teach me.

  My parents’ memory worked on me as a weak force; but it worked continuously, and wore away at the distance between me and the old events. Distance slowly compressed, until I faced their past as if it were my own. It was my own, one day. And everyone’s. Anyone who cares to listen.

  For to ignore the past is to make a new compact with its wrongs. Refusing to forget, you take on a flood of guilt, whether you recognize it or not.

  Then you feel it.

  You carry it at last.

  It’s a burden and a relief. You are involved, and everything takes on new meanings. Then, maybe, you have a chance to be constructive, to pass on the good and add to it.

  My father said, “Biology passes things on in another way, more impersonally, of course. A good culture does it through education, by telling stories. It’s more laborious, but when it works... a good culture overwhelms its past and invades the future.” He smiled at me. “Then, you have to carry it, keep it from deteriorating, because there’s always enough evil in all of us to go around. I’m sorry I couldn’t have brought you into a better world.”

  I touched his hand as we sat in his study, and felt foolish.

  5

  I have already told you that most of the kids were shy of each other, and why this was so; keeping apart was something we picked up from the adults, but we always felt wrong about it, and it was easier to keep the girls separate from the boys.

  But this changed when the return failed, even among the boys. Many of us stayed together longer after meals. We gathered in the smaller dining hall. There was a sense that we should do something, but no one seemed confident enough to say what that might be.

  We talked a lot about why the return had not happened. I imagined the rock’s cometary orbit. How far had we come in fifty years? What was out here? Could we have missed Earth on the way back? It was only a big, elliptical swing, from what I knew, not an open-ended course, so it had to have brought us back in the allotted time.

  As I listened to the fears and speculations, I thought about how the food got up to us from the factory somewhere below ground; how wastes were recycled, as well as air and water—especially how the water flowed into our streams, how it left our lake.

  And then I wondered how long all these systems might last. For how long had they been designed to work? I imagined our sunplate going out, the food halls unable to provide, the air filling with poison...

  There had to be a way down into the engineering level.

  We started to dig up the countryside here and there, using some of the gardening tools. It was slow work. My father told me that even if we reached one of the areas above the engineering spaces, we would hit metallic constructions and not be able to get through to the inside. More likely there was an entrance, but he didn’t know anyone who knew where it was or how it might be opened.

  “We were brought in blindfolded,” he said. “By the time we were permitted to see, they had shut us in... and thrown away the keys,” he whispered.

  “But you came in somewhere,” I said. “At which end? In the middle?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe someone else remembers. I don’t. I found myself standing in the square of this barracks group, wondering how we would choose up quarters. Don’t know which direction we came from. Seems there was no direction to look back.” He smiled. “Who thought we would need to remember?”

  My friends and I dug up a lot of ground. Tired and disappointed, we sat after our evening meal and wondered what we could do about anything. We were inside a large object, made to hold us in. That fact pressed itself on us as never before.

  “Seems to me,” I said, and all heads turned suddenly to look at me as if I was about to announce a discovery, “that we should be able to think where we can find an entrance. It’s there somewhere.”

  My father had laughed as he said, “The sky is beneath our feet, son, literally, but you’ll never find it.”

  “Why are you so sure?”

  “You’ve been looking hard. They were afraid of that kind of looking.”

  “But if our time is up,” I said, “would they still keep us in? If something went wrong, wouldn’t they want us to find a way out?”

  He looked pained when I said “our time,” because he was thinking that his time had become my time.

  “Maybe our orbit was not meant to bring us back,” he said. “It’s long, open-ended, for all practical purposes.”

  “They did it on purpose?” I asked.

  “Or accidentally. We may never know. One day our life support and nutritional systems will fail, and that will be a slow end. We’re not farmers. No seeds. A slow descent into starvation and cannibalism, until the last of us dies. Maybe the light would stay on longest...”

  He saw the fear on my face and said, “I was born into a time when human beings were still only half-human, when half or more of each of us was still hidden from us, and the best we could do about the harm and violence in us was talk about it, write about it, compose music and plays and poems. It all made for high drama and entertainment, better to look at or read than to live...”

  “And that’s what we’re going back to?” I asked.

  “Probably.”

  “How can you be sure?” I asked, chilled by his words.

  “Because they would have taken better care of us, cared enough about what is now happening to have come out here to check.” He shook his head. “It’s the same in here, son. What they have back there in their unfinished humanity is what we have here. The same brutality...”

  I trembled a little at what I saw in his aging body.

  “We’ll get out,” I said. “We’ll get out because we have to.”

  “If that’s all it took,” he said, “then there would be hope.” He smiled. “We’re still the same humanity we left behind. Just think of all the people you know here that you’re wary of, and you’ll know what I mean. They play games and brawl. What else is there to do?”

  “We’ll stick together,” I said, “because we have to.” I looked at him carefully. “If you’re trying to tell me that we’ll fail even if we succeed, somehow...”

  “No, no,” he said, “it won’t be that clear cut. It’s what’s inside us all, including the people... back home, that’s always been the problem.”

  “Are we all rotten?” I asked, thinking that he was trying to discourage me.

  “No, it’s a mix. A needed mix, from the way we came up from the animals. We’ve been shaking it off, and maybe some of it we should never shake off, or we’ll become helpless in what is probably a violent universe. Whatever we do, we should not lie to ourselves about the things we feel, the terrible things we imagine doing to others. Give any one of us enough power, and we’ll do terrible things. The ambiguous thing is that some of the terrible things human beings have done in their history are... useful, needed... in ways we can’t much like at the personal level, or at least until they become useful long after being terrible, even if it’s only to become part of the kind of insightful play we call a tragedy.”

  He talked this way a lot, and I only half-understood then, sometimes not at all. Was he trying to make me see something useful, or just to protect me? Once he told me it might be best to “not be,” and quoted someone named Schopenhauer, who believed non-being might be the greatest achievement of a thinking being, to see that the starry universe of suns and galaxies was nothing, nothing at all, to the will that had, mercifully and with full understanding of its own repetitious willing, turned and denied itself. It was the same, he said, with stars and salmon.

  Except that I had never seen the stars and galaxies, or the leaping and doomed salmon he described with tears in his eyes. He seemed to miss them, or maybe it was only their striving struggle that he loved.

  “So should we continue digging?” I asked, wanting to hit someone to make him feel better. “Will it do any good?”

  “You’ll do what you have to, you and your friends,�
� he said. “You have a purpose now.”

  “But you don’t think we’ll succeed.”

  “What do I know? None of us knows what is possible, except that the possible is doable by definition, even if everyone fails to do it. It’s the good that comes later that must be judged... later.”

  “You sound,” I said, “as if we have no choice about it.”

  “In one way you don’t. The environment draws out of you what is possible within you and within itself. Your choice is whether you’ll rise to it. Most won’t, or just unthinkingly don’t.”