Brute Orbits

by George Zebrowski

  Ironically, it was his sense of justice, or the “unfitness of things,” as he called it, that had led him down the paths he had taken.

  There had always been in him, he recalled with the warmth of the Sun on his shielded face, a great temptation. It came from observing nice, middle-class neighborhoods—once the suburbs of the rich, where well scrubbed children went to shiny schools, and repressed parents struggled with their own forgotten dreams to give their children “a good future”—and then picturing going in to rape and pillage and kill, just to see the shocked looks on the faces of the innocents who had never imagined what human nature could do, how it could commit the transcendent act of cancellation called murder and still go on, feeling next to nothing about it.

  He imagined that some of his ancestors among the Mongol hordes might have felt this way as they looked at the porcelain cities of China, laid waste to them and their unsunned peoples, then went back to nurture their own children on horseback with no sense of anything contrary…

  This way of seeing things troubled him, in the way it was wrong: wrongful only if faced and understood as such. One had to agree to the right, to assent to live and be judged in a certain way. When one chose otherwise, only force might bring one to justice. And one had to feel that it was justice; if one did not, or could not, then the law could only imprison or kill one’s body, leaving the spirit that resisted untouched, unashamed, and unrepentant.

  It was a maddening problem to think about: One could choose moral standards, but only on faith, since they could not be justified except by an earlier standard, and that led to the infinite regress of justifications. Infinite regresses, like circular arguments, insulted the mind. Faith gave one the sense that a moral standard was right and had to be upheld; but to those who felt unable to choose it, this right or wrong would mean nothing. Yet, these moral outsiders had their own standards to be judged by…

  What it came down to was that one could not choose a moral standard rationally, as something proved. One accepted morals on faith, from the normal behavior of the common community, from vague concepts like common human sympathy, seeing the interests of others as one’s own, or in purely legal terms, knowing, in a purely practical way that someone might enforce a law. Sympathy seemed to grow between certain people, as if a kind of natural selection were at work in the psyche: Those who could get along got along, even if much of the time they only went along to get along…

  Humankind’s efforts at tight social control had sometimes achieved lower reported crime rates. Reported: most crimes remained invisible. Efforts at “fatal liberty” had produced high crime, with only the tip of it visible socially. All the in-betweens of control and liberty had been inconclusive. Most people, the middle class, needed no police; they were suspended between power and the street, committing only minor offenses. In these domesticated human beings, ethical norms mostly enforced themselves, much as offenses against logic sometimes ruled the conduct of prideful intellects.

  The best world Tasarov could imagine would only achieve criminality with better manners so no one would care…

  There was yet time to start over. He was still young enough to disappear completely, and be someone else.

  4

  Lockdown

  As the sunless daylight shone red through his eyelids, Philip Emmons woke up to another shift of construction work inside the Rock. The prisoners had pitched tents while the prefabricated housing, resembling old-style barracks, was going up on the muddy incurving plain. Floors and walls were spot-welded and bolted down on ceramic block foundations; there was no need for the degrees of strength required in open weather structures, since the enclosed ecology here was more like that of a greenhouse potted plant.

  He wondered, as he got up from his bunk, how he knew such simple things but could not remember most of his life, or the crime for which he was here. He poured some water from the plastic can into his washbasin, noting that his two companions in the tent were already up and gone. Were they that eager to work? The buildings would be better than tents, he admitted sluggishly, knowing that he was not fully awake. Simple thoughts to wake up by; sterner fare would come later in the day.

  He put on his boots, hitched up his khaki shorts and adjusted his shirt—his clothes were too short and too tight for his slightly overweight frame—then stepped out of the tent.

  The first thing he noticed was that the guards were some way off, six of them, armed with stun-rifles, but they seemed uninterested in the construction going on around them. True, no one could really escape from the asteroid’s inscape unless they got into the engineering level and seized a shuttlecraft, but it would be very chancy. Where could they take the craft? There would be plenty of time to track it and do what had to be done at the other end or even before it got there. The disastrous crash landing at Lawrence, Kansas, had certainly led to a rethinking of prison security in all its forms, from the oldest prisons like Dannemora to the high tech supermaxes and orbital Rocks.

  Something was going on, he suspected, because too few of the guards here made any show of their authority. Their lack of interest throughout the last two weeks made him as wary as he would be of a man who had a gun and hated him, but had promised not to kill him. He smiled to himself as he went toward the building he had been working on. Fat lot of good suspicions would do him here; even if he guessed something, it would be too late by the time it went down—and what could he do then? Maybe it wasn’t anything important at all. What could be in this place? Everything important had already been done.

  “Mornin’, bigfella,” Jay Polau said to him as he and Harry Howes held two panels together to be bolted.

  “Give us a hand?” asked Howes.

  Emmons spit into the mud at his feet, then came over and took his place in the work detail. As Polau started to turn the fitted bolts into place, Emmons glanced over toward the guards. No one was looking at them.

  Polau said, “Yeah, I noticed them ignoring us, too. They’ve either lost interest or they know something we don’t.”

  “Like what?” Howes asked, sounding even greener than he looked.

  Polau said, “They know they can do what they want with us while we’re here, so maybe they’re just playing with us, making us think it won’t be so bad.”

  As the automatic bolts burst into place, Emmons glanced at Polau, and the look of quiet fear on the small thief’s face told him that he expected it was going to be bad.

  “You’ve been locked up,” Polau said, standing back to admire his handiwork. “I can tell.”

  “Maybe. I just don’t remember,” Emmons answered.

  “But you’ve never been,” Polau assured Howes. “It would be there even if you’d never lost your mind inside. Take my word for it, he’s got the look of one who’s been.”

  “What look is that?” Howes asked.

  “Ever seen animals in a zoo?”

  “I think so…long time ago.”

  “And you don’t see what I see?”

  “Not particularly,” Howes said.

  Polau smiled. “It takes one to know one. Just look at him!”

  Irritated, Emmons said, “And you’re sure?”

  “Well, yeah, I’ve been.”

  I don’t like you, Emmons wanted to say, but Howes was already lifting the next panel and he didn’t feel strongly enough to fight over it; maybe that’s what the guards wanted to see.

  But Polau wasn’t going to let it go that easy. He would save it up. Emmons glanced at the guards. They still seemed uninterested. Emmons grasped the panel with Howes and waited. Polau shook his head, then pressed the first bolt in without another word.

  ■

  At the end of the day the guards were smiling at them as the work shifts returned to their tents. Building some comfort would take a while, Emmons realized, thinking of the thirty years ahead of him, then wondering how little it meant to him. What was he losing? There was no one he would miss…maybe the planet, although he had not been on Earth for some time
before his arrest. There was something wrong with him, it seemed. He looked at the landscape inside the hollow, mud and dirt flat enough to walk around on but running away up and over your head, and thought that maybe he’d miss seeing the stars at night.

  “The guards, they know something,” Polau said.

  What are you talking about, Emmons wanted to say, but didn’t want to start the annoying little thief going again.

  “What could they know?” Howes asked with a tremor in his voice as they came to their tent, and Emmons realized that the young man had brought all his feelings with him, and that he had no control over them that would last. Not that every man’s innards weren’t a three-ring circus going all the time; but one had to not mind it, at least not take it too seriously. He found it disturbing to suddenly see how much more of a mess Howes was inside than most.

  Most? Who did he know? He couldn’t think of anyone.

  ■

  The next morning there were no guards at all. As he came out of the tent, Emmons noticed that the daylight was not up very high at all, and it was way past time for the sunplate to be bright. A few of the other emerging inmates had noticed the same thing and were pointing as they gathered in groups. He stretched and scratched his growing beard, then wondered whether he should shave it off. He got no answer from himself, and felt as though he could not come fully awake, as if he had been drugged for a long time now, and had to come back from a great distance to think about himself at all. He had a dim recollection that there was some other way to be awake, to react to people, and that his own special ways were not there for him, because somehow he had forgotten them.

  He looked around at the sea of tents on the mudflats around him, then at the growing town of barracks, then at the strangely dim sunplate at the end of the five kilometer long asteroid hollow, and felt a chill breeze touch his face. He looked up at the land that curved up and around overhead and came back on itself in place of a horizon, and saw a sixty meter high figure of a man materialize on the upward slope above the city of tents.

  The man was of middle years, with a full head of white hair, and wore a single-piece black suit with a medallion attached just below his chin.

  “Good morning, inmates,” the hologram said in a loud but pleasant tenor, “I am Warden Sanchez. There are several announcements to be made this morning before you go to work.” This brought the rest of the inmates out of their tents.

  “Turn up the light!” Polau shouted.

  The large figure paid no attention, and it seemed to Emmons, although he did not know why he should think it, that this was a one-way apparition, projected by an uncaring heaven. Nothing was going back to the warden.

  Nevertheless, the figure seemed to look around as if seeing and taking stock, and for a moment Emmons imagined that he glimpsed something benign in the warden’s gaze. He was puzzled that he should think he saw even a suggestion of sentiment where he was not looking for it.

  “You five thousand have been sentenced to thirty or more years. You are now building your first town. Later today, you must prepare yourselves for a change. Your habitat will be boosted into a thirty year solar orbit. There will be several minutes of acceleration, during which time it will be best if you are lying down in your bunks or on the ground. When boost is over, acceleration will cease and normal spin gravity will reassert itself, since you will again be in free fall…”

  A cry went up from the men as they came out of their tents and looked up at the warden. At first it was a cry of surprise and protest, then it became a howl of anger. Many collapsed or sat down on the ground. Some began to weep as the full meaning of what was being said became clear to them.

  “…there will be no guards to mistreat you,” Warden Sanchez was saying. “Escape will be impossible. But you will be able to live as you see fit in the time you must serve. You will learn about the food facilities we have prepared for you, the hospital self-service that will be useful to those of you who have had some medical training, and the building programs. You will have to help one another.”

  Many of the men were now shaking their fists and cursing at the giant figure.

  “In thirty years the habitat will return to its starting point, and be met by booster attach-vessels to slow it back into a high-Earth orbit. Your cases will then he reviewed, and the example of your community observed by specialists. Everything will depend on what state we find you in…”

  “It’s illegal!” Polau cried.

  As if in answer, though a bit late, Warden Sanchez said, “If any of you are wondering about the legality of this new program, it is already well established that prisons may be built and maintained anywhere that the state deems proper. There is no change in your sentences, but quite possibly this may be the best way to incarcerate you. Those of you who have been in various Earthside prisons and jails certainly know how…limited they are. We will now leave you to yourselves, with no one to complain about except yourselves, to rehabilitate yourself, if you so choose. I wish you the best of luck…”

  Suddenly the image was gone, its message delivered as swiftly as an eviction notice posted on a door.

  Emmons stood with Polau and Howes at his left and right, knowing that he should feel something, aware that everyone around him was stunned while he still waited to feel the reality of what had been announced.

  The sound of the men continued as a vast murmur for a while, and then fell silent as they reverted to the security of their assigned tasks.

  As Emmons worked on the exterior barracks panels with Howes and Polau, the younger man said, “I don’t know…but it will be different, knowing that the Earth is not really nearby.”

  “Who cares,” Polau said with a show of bravado. “All we’ll ever see is the inside of here anyway, so what’s it matter?”

  And Emmons knew, even though he felt little, that it did matter, that it would probably matter more and more as time went on.

  “They won’t get to me with this,” Polau said. “I’ll take anything they can dish out.”

  But Emmons knew that he would not be able to take it.

  At noon, before anyone had a chance to eat, a voice said out of the great hollow, “Lie down now. Acceleration is about to start.”

  Many of the men looked up, but did not lie down. A large number sat down where they stood. Then a low rumble began from the ground, and slowly grew into a growl, as if a great invisible beast would be loosed into the great inner space. The rest of the men fell to the ground; some tried to hold onto it, as if they feared being swept away.

  Emmons sat down and lay back. The great sunplate flickered at the forward end of the hollow. The growl reached a peak and he felt a tug pulling him toward the sunless end of the asteroid. The tugging reached its peak and remained constant. He could easily resist sliding by digging his hands into the mud.

  He waited, picturing what was happening, surprised that he knew how it was happening. External booster ships, at least two of them, had attached themselves on the long axis of the asteroid, and were now simply adding to the Rock’s already existing Earth-orbital velocity around the Sun, enough to send the Rock out from the Sun on a cometary orbit. The length of the boost would determine how long that orbital period would be. Somewhere, he had learned some orbital mechanics; he felt both oddly reassured and puzzled to remember it now.

  The growl and the tug on his body continued for much longer than he expected. Many of the men around him were crying out, cursing, as they dug their fingers into the mud. Their shouts and cries became louder as the growl died down and the tug of acceleration stopped.

  Emmons sat up and looked around. Centrifugal gravity seemed to be the same. He stood up to confirm, and felt no difference from before. Everywhere men were sitting up, standing up, like the dead rising from their graves.

  “Rotten shits,” Polau said. “They couldn’t wait until we had lunch!”

  Emmons saw that the men were now looking toward the chow facilities a kilometer away, where they knew that only m
achines waited to serve them. There would be no guards to mock or glare at.

  Slowly, groups began to move toward the three silver prefab domes. Emmons knew that the mess halls now beckoned as very special huddling places.

  “Coming?” Polau asked.

  Emmons glanced at the young Howes. The man smiled at him, and Emmons was seized with a sense of failure because he did not want to return the smile.

  ■

  There was mostly silence in the mess hall where Emmons, Polau, and Howes ate. Few wanted to talk about the new situation. They took their food from the slots, sat at the tables, tore open the packaged rehydrated meals of meat substitutes and vegetables, ate quickly, and recycled the containers. There were no knives or forks.

  After dinner, the men wandered back toward their tents. There was an appalling sense of the waiting days that stretched ahead for three decades. The absence of authority seemed strange and unreal.

  Emmons went back into the tent and lay down. The light was dimming outside, and he wondered if he would be able to go to sleep.

  “What can we do!” shouted a voice.

  “We can’t let this happen!” shouted another.

  Emmons got up and stood outside the tent. Men seemed to be gathering around a few figures a hundred yards away.

  “But what can we do?” a figure demanded.

  “What we need to do,” another started to say, “is talk to someone. There’s got to be a communications center somewhere.”

  “But where?” asked the first speaker.

  “Under our feet,” said another man, “there’s an engineering and maintenance level. The way we came in. That’s where the communications gear has to be.”