Brute Orbits

by George Zebrowski

  The rest of the girls, even those his age, were competing for the oldest non-addicted guys, the eighteen to twenty-fives. There were maybe ten thousand people in the Rock, counting the screamers.

  There wasn’t much to do except eat, sleep, and spy on the older guys making it with the girls you couldn’t get, and avoid getting beaten up by the gays and perverts. Many of the frooties would just ask, even beg, but the pervs went around in twos and threes, and they could get you. Unwilling girls were stalked, but he had not yet gotten up the courage to try it until today.

  He was following a tall, willowy girl with short blond hair who liked to go up to the grove behind the mess halls. A footpath was being worn through the grass to the place. As he came to the grove of maple trees, he noticed a flurry of movement on the ground. He crept closer and peered out from the side of a tree. The girl was on the ground, her arms pinned by a tall, dark-haired boy. She struggled, then lay back, cursing at him as he reached down and started to pull up her denim skirt. She threw her long legs into the air, trying to get him into a headlock, but missed every time.

  Ricardo stepped into view and shouted, “Hey, let her go!” He didn’t know why he did it.

  The boy looked at him and grinned. “Wanna watch? I don’t mind.”

  The girl broke loose as he spoke and scrambled to her feet. The boy reached out for her crotch. She turned and fled through the trees. The tall boy came up to him and knocked him down. Then he started after the girl.

  Ricardo got up with blood in his mouth, and followed at a run.

  He felt useless as he stopped outside the trees.

  The girl was running swiftly across the grass, but the tall boy was pushing hard and gaining. He caught up with her, and the two figures fell silently out of sight into the tall grass.

  Ricardo sat down, unable to sort out his feelings.

  After a while, he saw the tall boy get up and march away.

  A minute later the girl got up and looked around. She saw him. He waved to her. She seemed to be looking toward him. He started to walk toward her. She turned away and marched toward the barracks.

  He watched as she neared one of the buildings. Two boys came out to meet her; then the boy who had left her in the grass came up from her left. The three seemed to be talking. She pointed toward Ricardo. The three boys started up toward him.

  As he neared the three boys, Ricardo saw that they were grinning at him.

  “Get him!” shouted one.

  Ricardo halted and stood his ground.

  They reached him, and the one who had left the girl in the grass grabbed him by his denim coverall.

  “What you doin’ out here, boy?” he demanded. “Spying?”

  “I was out walking,” Ricardo said defiantly. “You said I could watch,” he added.

  “Who sent you?” asked a short redheaded boy.

  “No one.”

  “She belongs to us, you know,” said a third boy. “She complained about you.”

  “I thought…” Ricardo started to say.

  “Yeah?” said the tall boy.

  “…you were hurting her,” he finished.

  “She likes it that way,” the tall boy said. “She likes to be hunted and chased. Get it?”

  Ricardo didn’t but nodded.

  The piggish boy sneered. “You can see he’s never been laid,” he said—and punched Ricardo in the mouth.

  The blow knocked him on his back.

  He lay still, as if he were someone else.

  “Ah, he’s no fun,” said the redhead.

  The three looked down at him with contempt.

  “Leave him,” the tall boy said. “He’ll be taking it up the ass in no time.”

  They turned and walked off, laughing…

  ■

  Ten years later, the screamers were all dead and buried or down the disposal chutes. Only a handful had kicked their habits and lived. It had been bad, with rotting bodies in the grass, until he had organized the dump squads.

  Ricardo sometimes remembered the laughter of the older boys who had tormented him. They were now old men in their thirties, the ones he had not killed. He and those younger than him now had all the best girls and the better women, including the leggy girl he had tried to help in the grass. His lawyer had given him a good idea when she had told him how handsome he was. He still looked very young, lied about his age, and counted himself a success.

  And the three old bullies went in fear of him.

  15

  Plato’s Cave

  JUDGE OVERTON’S PRIVATE CHAMBER

  * * *

  “There are those who say we should pay up front, or pay at the other end of a life, by building higher walls. They say that education and health must deal with human lives, whose value is beyond price. As an investment, lives should not be subject to the marketplace. The original investment in education and health, in the quality control of bringing new human beings on line, should not be counted or begrudged in any way, since the benefits of prevention will prove to be incalculable.

  “To all this I say well and good—but what do we do with the ones who are past any rehabilitation, immune to deterrence, and likely to train more like them? Every generation of humanity to date has been damaged in some way by the previous generation; but until we learn how to make a better generation, we have to protect ourselves. Now we’ve mined all these rocks, and we’re filling them up. They’re available, ready and waiting for that twenty percent who will never be able to return successfully to normal life.”

  * * *

  In the second year of her imprisonment Abebe Chou learned to take a perverse pleasure in the sewing circle. She liked especially to frame chaotic difficulties which set the five men to untangling subtle errors in reasoning or use of fact, forcing them to return to square one of the discussion; at that point she would present another complex misconception with a straight face.

  It was pathetic how they vied to instruct her, with the unspoken hope that she would come to prefer one of them over the others. Sadder still were their contortionist efforts to deny the reality of their competition with each other. It was obvious, and yet they continued in their hypocritical good manners. The beast trying to rise above its ancient ways.

  On a Saturday morning, by the accepted calendar, as she made her way across the field to the usual meeting place, she noticed that the color was bleeding out of the world. Greens, blues, and distant browns were darkening, as if the sunplate was fading much too quickly toward its usual nightly moonlight.

  But it was already way past that, and in less than a minute she stood in complete darkness, unable to see the well worn path in front of her. She put her hand before her face and saw nothing. The blackness was complete.

  “Abebe!” Leibniz cried out with concern.

  “Are we all blind?” she called back.

  “No!” Lenin answered. “Something’s gone wrong with the sunplate.”

  She moved slowly up the path, knowing that it went straight ahead to the group, with only a minor curve to the left.

  “Does anyone have a light?” Stalin called out.

  She stopped, realizing that she had never seen a flashlight in the habitat. There had to be matches somewhere, but she did not recall ever having seen them either.

  She stopped and turned around in the darkness, straining to see if anyone back at the town had lit a fire; but the blackness around her was still unbroken. Suddenly she did not know which way she had come or which way she had been going.

  “This way, Abebe!” Trotsky cried.

  She turned toward the voice, then got down on her knees and felt where the path had been worn through the grass.

  “Stay where you are!” Newton called out. “Maybe the light will come back shortly.”

  She sat down where she knelt and waited.

  After a few minutes, cries of anger and dismay drifted up from the town. She turned her head, but still saw no light of any kind. There was nothing to burn, she realized, except p
erhaps the grass; but it was probably not dry enough.

  This was a major failure, she thought, and no one knew the way into the engineering level; but even if a way had been found, there was no certainty that it was a fixable failure.

  “Abebe!” Stalin called out. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she shouted back. Why wouldn’t I be, she thought, wishing that she still had the watch John Sakari had given her before their separation. He had let her keep it, and she recalled that its face had glowed in the dark.

  There was no way to tell how much time had gone by since the blackout, but it seemed long. Time seemed to slow in the absence of light.

  Again, she realized that they had nothing to burn, even if a way were available to start a fire. There was simply no need for a flame, not even in the mess halls.

  She realized that after a long while there would be no choice but to attempt to reach the mess halls. Maybe there they would find some light, some glow from the equipment.

  But as she looked around, she realized that the blackout might mean a more general loss of power. No food would be delivered from the manufacturing plants below the mess halls, where the proteins, carbohydrates, fibers, and nutrients were melded into the uninteresting but necessary edibles and liquids.

  Within six hours, she knew that hunger would force her to try for one of the mess halls, if she could remember its direction from the path. She would have to walk very slowly, arms out like a blind person.

  “Abebe!” Lenin cried. “Try to get up here to us. No point in sitting there alone. Conversation is better here.”

  She smiled, picturing the fools sitting in the dark, continuing their discussion like the inmates of Plato’s cave—except that here there was no fire to cast shadows on the wall to help them develop a theory of knowledge.

  “Well, are you coming?” Trotsky called out.

  It struck her how irritatingly distinctive their voices and intonations were in the dark. “Lenin” was Goran Tanaka, of New Tokyo, a sociobiologist, and his voice was a plaintive tenor; “Stalin” was Lono Sada, a linguist and low tenor; “Trotsky” was Saburo Nakamura, a security codes expert, a high tenor; “Newton” was Malik Al-Amlak, a physicist with a high tenor voice, whose self-given name meant “king of kings.” “Leibniz” was Salmalin Sander, a Hindustani-Bulgarian economist, whose pleasant baritone was out of place in the sewing circle.

  Newton-Malik hated Leibniz-Sander in a seemingly deep-seated way; this animosity was what had prompted her to name them after the historical antagonists. Sir Isaac Newton had vowed “to break Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s heart” for having the effrontery to co-discover the calculus. And he had done so. But she had not been able to discover why Malik so disliked Sander. Their antagonism was obvious when she saw them together. They sat far apart, and gave only token evidence of noticing each other.

  “Come along, Abebe!” Stalin cried. “Wait out this inconvenience among friends.”

  Abebe felt a chill, as if the temperature in the great hollow had dropped. She had a sudden vision of some great failure in the systems of the worldlet that would not be repaired, and all its inmates would die in cold and darkness.

  She waited for the dim glow of the sunplate to appear in her field of vision. She opened her eyes wide, as if somehow there was some light that her open pupils might drink in; but the darkness remained complete. It seemed to threaten to become coal-solid.

  She shivered in the increasing chill.

  ■

  After what seemed like more than an hour, Abebe got up and made her way up the path toward the voices. The speakers heard her approach and fell silent.

  “We’re so glad you could join us,” Stalin said as she knelt down in the darkness and found a spot.

  Again there was an awkward silence.

  “Shall we simply sit here and wait?” she asked. “Is it reasonable to suppose that somehow the sunplate will come back on?”

  “We’re not engineers,” Lenin said with a hint of fear and resentment in his voice. “What do you suggest we do?”

  They were always falling into old male patterns: a woman complains and a man feels he’s being blamed; but if he doesn’t know what to do, he reacts resentfully or aggressively.

  “Malik?” she asked.

  “Well, I hope it’s not the fusion source itself.”

  “How could it go wrong?” Trotsky asked him, happy to shift the responsibility to another source of possible wisdom.

  “Well, I certainly hope it has not been struck from outside by a meteor.”

  “Would we have felt the shock?” asked Leibniz.

  “Not if it was small, but it could still do significant damage,” answered Newton. “I don’t know the design, but the habitat must have some kind of buffer or debris deflector.”

  Abebe said, “Or they didn’t care enough to give us one.”

  “Well, the odds of being struck are small,” Newton said in his usual prissy way, as if he were out taking the air. He had once chided her for bringing up the idea that molecules might somehow be alive, and she had imagined that he might have wanted to address them.

  They were all silent again, and Abebe began to think of what they would have to do if the darkness continued indefinitely. Would they stumble and crawl toward the mess halls to eat?

  It was definitely getting colder.

  “If there’s no power,” Newton said in a sing-song, “then even the mess dispensers won’t work.”

  “Oh, shut up, Malik,” Lenin said to the physicist. “You don’t have to try to cheer us up.”

  Again there was a long silence.

  “Which way are the barracks?” Stalin asked. “And which way the mess?”

  “Straight down the path, as I sit,” Abebe said. “Then left and right.”

  “But the path ends,” Trotsky said.

  “We keep straight on,” Leibniz said. “The way is clear in my mind’s eye.”

  “Is that possible in this utter darkness?” Lenin asked.

  “We can only try,” Stalin said. “A bank was never robbed by mere talk.” He mentioned banks quite often, which was why Abebe had named him Stalin. The old Bolshevik had routinely robbed czarist banks to fill the party’s coffers.

  “Are we safer here or there?” Abebe asked. “Perhaps we should wait a bit longer.”

  It was strange, she thought through another long silence, how expectation of light’s return persisted, even as her intellect whispered that it was possible she might never see again.

  ■

  “It’s been a while,” Lenin said. “Perhaps we should consider doing something. Maybe we should get back to our quarters.”

  Abebe had never seen such darkness. Not a patch of light anywhere, however she turned her head. The only stimulus to her retinas was from the transient effect of rubbing her eyes.

  “We should go,” Trotsky said, “while we still have our strength, before we weaken from hunger. Not much can happen to us. We might trip in the grass, but no more. We can’t really get lost.”

  Leibniz said, “We know where we are, and at worst we’ll find our quarters by luck. After all, how many directions can we try?”

  Fool, Abebe thought.

  “Maybe we should try for the mess halls?” Stalin said.

  “But if nothing works,” Newton replied, “then we won’t even be able to eat.”

  “So we stay put,” Lenin concluded.

  It grew even colder.

  Something was seriously wrong, Abebe thought, and there was no way to fix it. Getting into the engineering level would require some dangerous digging, with no guarantee that the right place would be found, or that anyone could fix it.

  She took a deep breath of the chilling air, then heard something moving in the grass near her. A hand touched her thigh.

  “Are you very upset?” asked Trotsky’s voice.

  The hand touched her more insistently, exploring inward. She was about to curse, but restrained herself, waiting to see how far t
he hand would go. It reached her stomach and began to finger her waistband.

  She grabbed the wrist and bent it back. Trotsky gave a grunt of pain and pulled his hand away.

  “What was that?” Lenin asked.

  They were all silent, obviously aware of what was happening. It had to start somewhere.

  Then Trotsky was on her, and the others scurried in around her, grabbing at her arms and legs, pushing her down. He tugged at her shorts and underwear, pulling them off together.

  She saw the scene in her imagination, fully lighted, as her legs came apart and Trotsky pressed into her and started his pushups. She waited for him to finish, hoping that there would be an instant in which she might break free and be gone into the dark—

  Trotsky spent himself like an old bull, breathing hard as he softened. He whispered in her ear, “You’re a goddess,” then pulled back and rolled to one side. “Thank you.”

  Her right arm was free, then her left, and then her ankles, and she knew that there would be a few moments of indecision.

  She felt a figure trying to crawl into position as Trotsky lay at her side, breathing hard and stroking her belly.

  She kicked with her right leg, and heard a snap as she connected. She sat up, threw herself forward, and rolled away into the darkness. She leaped to her feet and ran blindly into the grass.

  “Come back!” Lenin shouted with a strange laugh. “We’ll need to keep warm before we die.”

  After a few moments, she slowed, realizing that they could not find her. She sat down, bare-assed, with only her shirt for cover. There was nowhere to go. She thought of John Sakaro, and how uncaringly he had thrown her away, into this prison, where the ground itself was a wall. She could not climb it; to dig through to the airless desert outside made as much sense as digging a tunnel out of life.

  As her breathing slowed, she shivered on the cold ground. The stars, she thought sadly, were below her—the beautiful bright stars in the black on the other side of the grass.