Brute Orbits

by George Zebrowski

  The trouble with humankind, she had decided, was that you never knew what was speaking out of any brain. Raise up the meek and they will abuse as well as anyone. The predator is only silenced by piles of food and the sight of his progeny crowding the landscape, and is then worn out by their raising and left behind…

  Sometimes, what managed to speak was the cortex, the white magician, so maligned by the rest of the brain for being naive, because it longed to leave behind the adaptive superstition of the instincts and the impulses of the automatic unconscious that wash the older bicameral brain. It was the cortex’s misfortune to be the newest level of a city like Troy, built upon many previous levels, unable to live and think without the ghosts that came up from below and raged through its clean, well-lighted ways. The cortex was an aspiring angel, whose ankles were still held by the ancient demons of evolution’s selecting slaughterhouse. Whenever the prattlings about maturity and psychological naivete were heard, the old animal father-mother was speaking, concerned only with survival and the hurling of progeny into time’s abyss. The bewildered child that asked why to everything was the angelic cortex, Billy Budd waiting to be crushed by Claggett, unsuited to the universe which had somehow produced it…

  She hated the sneering, patronizing forms of discussion that she had grown up with. Even as a child she had wondered who or what was speaking, as if a stranger had awakened in the adult who was talking to her. And upon hearing what the stranger said, a Luciferian rebellion had swelled in her heart against these judgments that did not know themselves…

  She stood up and saw that the rest of the sewing circle, as she thought of the five men and herself, was sitting down on the hillside far down to her right. For a moment she was touched by their innocent, unquestioning belief in the adequacy of discussion to probe and grasp, and even to shape the future. She had pet names for them—Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Newton, Leibniz, and she was—who? Lenin’s wife, the crow-like Krupskaya? Eleanor Roosevelt? Maybe Madame Touchard? Mrs. Parker? In all truth, she sometimes did not know her own name.

  It was the feuds among the historical names that had prompted her to rename these men when she listened to their bickering. She had not thought of them by their true names for some time now; but she never addressed them by their pet names. She used no names at all with them.

  Not one of them was the equal of Abebe Chou, who had supposedly stolen a billion dollars online, which had never been found, and whose political ideas seemed about to influence her lover, John Sakari of India, frightening the powerful whose fortunes rode with his. He had been appalled at the charges brought against her, but when it came to choosing her over his future in power, he had given her up.

  Gone was her love.

  Gone was the medical renewal of her life at fifty.

  Gone was her chance to have become someone and made a difference.

  Going fast was her compassion for her kind.

  Growing fast was bitterness and hatred.

  ■

  She came down the hillside and sat down among the sheltered wusses, the urban tunas who had been caught in the nets set by human sharks, and would never get free. It was dismaying to know that there were more sharks and tunas where they came from, and that the struggle would not end any time soon, unless the species found some way to reach into its deepest regions and remake itself; but that might be as hard as expecting Zapata’s gunman to lay down his gun. Look at what was trying to remake itself. The only hope was that small changes would in time catch the species unawares. But how to keep vitality and strength in the midst of a flickering goodness that strength saw only as dangerous weakness?

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she said, noticing with her usual upsurge of vanity how they gazed at her with admiration and longing. Brutality had long been repressed in them, and hid its rapacious hopes—but how long would it stay? She knew as they smiled at her that she would reject each of them in turn; and they feared that somewhere in this population there were some she might not reject; but how long would it take to find them? How long before the show of civilization and order crumbled—five years, ten, twenty? Would everyone pair off and be happy with their lot? Would they all despise each other for living out their time as civilized people?

  “People say you can’t do this and you can’t do that,” Lenin said, as if resuming a train of thought pulled out of her mind, “but what they mean is that you shouldn’t.”

  “So what’s your point?” Trotsky asked.

  “They should say what they mean. And to them I say that I can very well do this or that, even when I choose not to. Even Unamuno, the religious, well understood that there was no basis for morality except insistence, in taking a free stand.”

  Stalin smiled and said, “The wind that blew in from the ocean had left its mark on the trees that leaned landward. One was so bent that its top branches nearly touched the ground.” Like his namesake, he fancied himself a poet.

  “Yes, yes, we are set in our ways,” Leibniz said with a wave of the hand, “but we can take small steps toward good, and these will add up. Then new windows of opportunity will open.”

  “They have added up—to this?” Abebe said.

  “No, no,” Stalin said with an uncharacteristically quick show of impatience. “You did not notice—I said top branches.”

  “So?” Leibniz replied.

  “There are tall trees, you know.”

  Not here, Abebe thought, thinking about the one rape she already knew about. There would have been a murder or a lynching if the woman had spoken out. The only guards or police possible here would be vigilantes.

  She felt humiliated as she looked around at her five comrades. Humanity had no more use for them or for her. Their major offense had been that they served no one powerful enough to have saved them from this exile.

  Each of these men had spoken up for the excluded and endangered, asking why some should be left out to die while the world’s powerful cut their political losses, isolated diseased populations, and looked ahead to a smaller humanity. The growing longlifers would not take all the living with them into the coming world; it was their one chance to rearrange power to insure their own survival.

  “If not us,” they cried, “then others will do the same, and they may not be as trustworthy. We have only to wait until their lives end as they would have anyway. After all, we can’t search out everyone on the planet to extend their lives. They would be unprepared for it. We need to start smaller.”

  “Not to act is to kill them,” she had whispered one night to John Sakari.

  “It’s not practical,” he had mumbled, and she had felt ashamed in the darkness of his bed. What he meant by practical or impractical was that it wouldn’t benefit anyone he knew very soon. Practical was short term, for himself and others like him; for her. He has assumed that she would gladly wear his chain of logic.

  “When life is long,” he had said, “and we no longer fear its end, then there will be time for justice. Where the many will one day go, a few must go first. We are not monsters, Abebe.”

  But we will not include those who speak against us, his silence had said. Because we are not monsters, words may hurt us, by spreading guilt and unease, and damaging our resolve…

  Twenty-five years, she thought, glancing at the bemused faces of her fellow inmates.

  They were all cowards, herself included, afraid of themselves. Afraid of doing evil to oppose it.

  ■

  In the first year the community only became more orderly, but Abebe remained suspicious of the cauldron that simmered beneath the surface, and might boil when least expected. True, no great prize of power existed to be seized, but her fellow inmates were still cowards, unable to face up to their own impulses and needs, afraid to do what their innards urged.

  She continued contemptuous of their timidity, but was sometimes taken aback. Did she really want them to run amok? The sewing circle, if they could have eavesdropped on her whispering self, would have laughed at the contr
adiction. She wondered at her mental state that saw all sides and liked none of them.

  It was not religion, law, nor ideals that had subverted humankind; it was humankind itself that was the villain, subverting religion, law, and high ideals. Frankenstein’s monster was no monster at all. Doctor Frankenstein was the monster—and not even all of him.

  But—she objected to herself—perhaps she was being sensitive to something else here. More seemed needed in this place than simply to do the time, but she could not flush out what it might be. She thought of it as a beast that she hunted regularly in her several mental jungles.

  How are we to live? How was she to live? Could anything be done? Was civil order all that might be hoped for? How to last the time with this growing knot inside her, with these festering contradictions and impulses that sent elder brain and hopeful cortex against each other? Countless thinkers had nursed these thoughts, she reminded herself. Man was not a state, but a predicament, and only the unreflective accepted themselves as finished and sufficient. The reflective knew otherwise, but did not know where else to go from themselves…

  Small steps. Baby steps. We must take all the falls before we can stand and stride. Most learn to stand; some stride; a few learn to dance well; does anyone learn to fly?

  She had come to the end of her humanity, and faced a wall of fossil flesh in her mind; she stood before it daily, looking for a crack, a small peephole, a way up and over, under or around. She did not know what waited on the other side, if anything; but she was willing to pay whatever asking price to find out.

  But whom was she to pay?

  14

  Warriors

  Of all the epidemics of violence, assault and murder by the young who felt nothing for their victims were the most fearsome and difficult to stop. Here the criminal justice systems of the Earth were dealing with warriors whose instinctive quickness, unchanged for half a million years, was at its height in teenage years. They had grown up outside the restraints that humankind had arrayed against itself, with no parenting or education and no hope of welcome in or outside their class. The stubbornly law-abiding among the working poor hated them. The lawful foraging homeless hated them. The heroic working poor and lower middle class feared them. They were outcasts and failures to the tactical criminals allied with the upper middle class and wealthy. In another age they would have served conquerors and warlords, and been sacrificed in battle to great effect.

  “How many warriors can you educate into post-industrial wusses?” the joke asked.

  “One,” was the answer.

  “If we can catch him.”

  “All of them,” said some politicians.

  “We cannot reform them,” proclaimed the longlifers. “And we cannot let them come to adulthood beside us. We must be careful what progeny we permit to grow as we live forward.”

  As the numbers of longlifers increased, they sought to slow and then abolish the past’s dead hand of chaotic comings and goings between generations and classes. Longlife meant keeping more benefits for themselves; there was too much to lose. This quickened the drift away from the class systems of twentieth century industrial quasi-democracies, in which the working class sometimes recruited from the poor, the middle class recruited from the working class, and the rich drew from the middle class. The borders between these divisions were becoming nearly impassable, to the degree where the usefulness of classes was being lost, to be replaced with a rigid and fruitless caste system.

  “These are the lost,” the longlifers said, lengthening on, “and it matters not if they live out their dead-end ways in a small worldlet, away from us. Among us they will only be unhappy and do us harm.”

  “Perhaps they can change,” said some, “if we were to give them more life, more time to start over.”

  “No—we will not let them into the new world we are making,” the others cried as they rushed toward their paradise. “Let them keep the life they have, but no more. We will not lengthen their nightmare into our dream.”

  There were just too many. With no mindfulness within them or likely to develop, and the abyss of homelessness and early death from violence and disease waiting to swallow them, they had nothing to lose. They struck back impulsively, gripped by the moment’s needs, without a horizon of hope or a teacher other than trial and error to guide their actions.

  Their presence was explained as a byproduct of market economies that had raised too many young in drugs and drink, that could not educate everyone, and in fact did not need everyone, but feared to say so. Parenting was a nonproductive activity, a hobby for those who could afford it and who lived with specific expectations from the future. The social cost of soulless young was not counted, leaving only the criminal justice system to deal with them.

  “There must be a price to pay for failure!” cried the wealthy, and it was paid thrice—by the failures, by their victims, and later by the society, and each paid too late.

  On Rock Six, sent for an expected thirty years, Ricardo Nona’s life was an eternal present. At fifteen his past was brief, his future blank; he had never had so much time to spend with himself, to see himself as someone else. The objects of his attention had always stood outside him; but now feelings he had been able to ignore swelled with the intensity that concentrated self-awareness forced upon him.

  He felt as if his thoughts were assaulting him, as if someone had put a spell on him. What was he doing here? What would he ever do here? Thirty years was forever. He was an orphan; no one cared for him back home. His closest relative had been an uncle, who had been shot to death by the police in Detroit only three days before Ricardo’s sentencing.

  His lawyer had explained his situation to him more than she probably wanted to. She was good looking, so he let her talk just so he could look at her longer.

  “They don’t care what happens to you,” she had said. “You killed three people in the carjack. You’re beyond any concept of rehab. They just want to get rid of you. I’m telling you this so that when your Rock comes back you’ll know why you did the time. It won’t do you much good now, but you’ll have time to think about it.” She had smiled slightly. “There’s not much else to say. I don’t think you’ll get into more trouble in the Rock, but it won’t matter. It’ll be you and the others. No police, no guards. I do wish you luck, Ricardo.”

  She had asked him why he did it, and all he could remember was that his two friends were going to do something and wanted him along. When the time came, it seemed right to kill the people in the car, or get killed. They had killed Mario right off, so at least one of them had to die. He had killed one, and Angela had killed the other. That made three. What had the judge expected? That he and Angela should have stood there and got shot? It seemed like a dream to think about it, and have it come out the same way every time.

  “Ricardo,” his lawyer had continued, “there’s not much more I can do for you except say a few things that might stick in your head. It’s my last shot. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he had said to make her feel better. What could it matter. She had great tits and good legs. Her butt was getting bigger, but still pretty good for over thirty. He could enjoy her if he had the chance.

  “Ricardo, the Rock you’re going to will be nearly all orphans, or so close it’s the same thing. It’s going to be overcrowded, because they’re packing in as many as they can get in before the boost.”

  “So?”

  She had smiled, trying to look friendly. He had thought of killing her right there, because there wasn’t much more they could do to him except kill him, but they weren’t killing lately.

  “Do you have any feelings about why you are here, and why you are as you are?” she had asked. “You might have been very different. Look—think this way, for just a few moments. You didn’t make yourself the way you think and feel right now, because you weren’t around to decide back before you were born. A lot of other things decided it for you.”

  He knew what she meant, but it di
dn’t matter.

  “A great judge said that if a child isn’t fixed between the age of three and seven, it’ll never be fixed. Do you feel you’ll never get better?”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” he had said, just to say something she obviously wanted to hear.

  “You know only what your way of growing up has taught you—look out for yourself and get what you can of what you need.”

  “Don’t you do that?” he had asked. “What else is there?”

  She had sighed. “Other people. You don’t need to step on them when they get in your way.”

  “You do if they try to step on you,” he had said.

  “It’s the way you look out for yourself and get what you need,” she had said. “And you will get it.”

  She had given him a long look of how sorry I am, then touched his cheek gently with her hand as she stood up. “You are a handsome boy, you know.” And she had left, thinking it was too bad.

  He was the youngest of the boys in the Rock, except for the hundred or so eleven-year olds. The oldest males and females here were well over twenty. The oldest had the largest number of screamers, the drug addicted, and the crazies. A few were recovering, but many were dying, unable to eat. He had seen a few of them sitting in the tall grass, where they had to sleep. They had been brought here at the last minute, a few thousand of them, just before the boost. There was no room for them in the barracks. They didn’t come to the mess halls to eat, and were getting sicker each day. A few were already dead.