Brute Orbits

by George Zebrowski

  16

  You Have Been Told…

  Tasarov grew apart from the men in the hollow, and sometimes felt that their very existence was an affront to him. He came to the mess halls at the appointed times, but increasingly he kept to himself in the engineering level. The warden’s apartment was comfortable, access to databases easy, and he could even walk long distances, exploring the engineering complex. He had yet to reach its end.

  He was hoping to find some sort of astronomical facility, where he might look out from the Rock, but so far he had failed to find it. Seeing the stars again became a minor obsession with him.

  He continued to search, building an inner life for himself. Out in the hollow a hundred men died in the first year—from personal violence and illness. A few died for no cause that anyone could see. They simply stopped. Some were buried in marked graves; others went down the garbage chutes to the recycling hellfire.

  Murders rarely occurred after the first year; a killer was either beaten or killed, or driven out into the grassy wilderness and not permitted to return. Some of these managed to beg their way back before they starved, if they sounded very convincing. Most offenses were settled between the parties involved. After a while most inmates learned to avoid disputes of any kind.

  A kind of peace settled in during the second and third years. It became an unspoken test of character to resist the distant authority of Earth, to live to prove them wrong when the Rock came home. Tasarov had once read that half the prisoners who went to Alcatraz, also known as “the Rock,” came out and lived lawful lives; but he could only believe that the old prison in San Francisco Bay had frightened them into cowardice.

  He never forgot that this Rock was a punishment prison, as many had been before it. No rehabilitation, no escape possible, no guards or authorities to blame; yet it seemed that some men were seeing it as rehab, as something better than a vendetta against lawbreakers, better than the vengeance of capital punishment.

  But he could not see it that way—not yet anyway. The arrogance of the Earth that had sent them out continued to astonish him. It worked its criminal justice systems with the illusion of clean hands, but they were not even moderately clean hands. The Earth was a mosaic of interlocking corporate societies and extortionist governments, where criminality was in fact the legal way of things. The system in fact created most criminals and then sought to punish them. For most of the human history he knew, social systems were the criminal’s true parents, whelping lawbreakers uncontrollably like the mythical salt mill which could not stop making salt. Certain kinds of criminality could be prevented, and that would eliminate most crime. But he was certain that even a very advanced social system, one that gave its citizens nearly everything they needed, leaving them nothing to covet, might still harbor the creative criminal, one who would undertake special projects simply because they were possible. Could that kind of enterprise be socially engineered out of human beings?

  It had always been clear to him that a sane criminal justice system was possible: one that would try the criminal, assess the price he had to pay for his crime, short of death, and commit no fresh crimes of its own against the criminal…

  “Fresh crimes?” they would ask.

  He knew the faces and types that would ask the question with outrage.

  “Yes—new crimes.” Not that he really cared for some of the slime that had been executed, but he had always felt that the example of killing a human being was demoralizing for those who did it by law. So brave! It was a cowardly act to tie down any human being and kill him. The criminal justice systems he had known were not perfect and never could be; but the death penalty was perfection itself—it killed you and there was no going back to correct errors, no way to bring back the dead. It would always be an unequal struggle between justice and official killing.

  “New crimes? Maybe so, but who cares! Too bad.”

  “If killing someone officially for a crime was still a traditional act of vendetta, then so be it,” they would say and shrug. But even they would not want to kill criminals en masse. They would rather fill the sky with prisons, as they overflowed every Earthly lockup. He was sure now that this Rock could not be the only one.

  By the fifth year, Tasarov had learned to keep dilemmas, nurture, and feed them, as a wild animal trainer keeps dangerous beasts, and they in turn kept up his skills. He saw them as demons that could not be banished. And their most important feature, he began to believe, was that they were unresolvable dilemmas. A man might be known by the dilemmas he keeps, especially the intractable ones.

  As he set down his thoughts, he still sometimes wondered about the Tightness of his mind, and wondered if the bent of his thinking was a bias setting given to him by nature. Being in your right mind was always a fence one could see over, but he still sometimes wondered which side of the fence he was on. Maybe he was sitting on the fence.

  ■

  In the sixth year Tasarov called a meeting, to be held in the open air, so that every inmate who wanted to come could be there.

  As he sat down at the table set for the judge, he considered the air of display about the trial that was beginning—as if someone might be listening back home, or some godlike lawgiver was peering into the hollow and waiting to make notes in a book of justice.

  An older man had knifed Howes to death out in the tall grass, and everyone had heard his screams.

  “We’re here,” Tasarov said as he raised a hand, “to determine why this happened, and what we should do about it.” He glanced at the man sitting on the ground in front of the table.

  “What do you care that I did it,” asked Wang Huichin, a burglar from Brooklyn, New York.

  There was a murmur of disapproval from the crowd sitting in a massive circle around the table. Everyone was not here, Tasarov noted, but more men were coming in around the edges for a listen.

  Tasarov waited for the murmurs to die down, then said loudly, “That’s what we’re here to tell you.”

  “Oh yeah?” Wang muttered under his breath.

  “Louder,” someone shouted from far back.

  Tasarov rose and got up on the table. “Can you hear me now?” he shouted.

  “Yes!” five different voices responded.

  He looked down at Wang, who seemed unconcerned.

  “If you had simply killed your lover,” said Tasarov, “I think many of us would understand. But you have now beaten up and nearly killed a dozen others—and you killed Howes!”

  Wang stood up. “You’re no law! What’s it to you?”

  Cries of anger rose from the crowd. Tasarov raised his arms for silence. “We’ve got to tell him,” he shouted, “—as much for ourselves as for him.”

  “What the fuck are you prattling about?” Wang asked. “Anybody wants to come and kill me can try! I’ll be happy to take him on.”

  Tasarov fixed him with his gaze and said, “Just this. Take any six men from this gathering and they’ll tell you we’ve had a somewhat peaceful time here. We eat, we sleep, and we have very little trouble. It could have been worse. You make it worse, Wang. No one feels safe from you. You killed Howes slowly. You wanted to, and it made you happy. Why’d you do it?”

  Wang looked at him without fear. “I had to do it. He didn’t want me, and I couldn’t live without him.”

  “Then why didn’t you kill yourself?”

  “They stopped me,” he said with sudden tears, “before I could.”

  Tasarov reached into his pocket, pulled out the murder knife, and threw it in down at Wang’s feet. “Then do it now!”

  Wang looked down at the knife.

  “I can’t…now.”

  “You can’t?” Tasarov asked coldly. “Then we’ll have to do it for you.”

  Wang looked up. “What? You can’t! You have no right.”

  “We can and we will. That’s all that matters. Here, give me back the knife.”

  Wang looked down at the instrument again, then backed away until he bumped into the first r
ow of seated inmates. One of them raised his leg and pushed him forward. Wang staggered and fell on his face. The knife lay in front of his nose.

  “Come on, give it here,” Tasarov said. “I’ll cut your throat for you.”

  Wang sat up, pulled his knees close and wrapped his arms around them.

  Tasarov said, “We have to take you out before you kill more of us.”

  “You really gonna kill me?” Wang asked with unbelief.

  “Then do it yourself, if that bothers you,” Tasarov said, getting off the table and sitting down.

  Wang put his head between his knees, and Tasarov could almost see the twists inside him. Wang looked up suddenly and said, “I won’t do it again. Please.”

  “I don’t think it’s up to you whether you kill again. We have to protect ourselves.”

  Tasarov knew himself well, and therefore, he told himself, he also knew something of Wang’s innards. Murders of his kind were not the rule. They were occasional evils, when one’s fixation on another reached out to relieve itself in violence. He had known it often, but practiced it sparingly.

  Wang looked up at him, still hugging his knees. “What did I ever do to you?” His eyes were reproachful, unbelieving. He made a pitiable figure bunched up on the ground. He might never kill again—or he might—there was no way to make sure. But there was also the fact the Wang seemed to enjoy the act. That need made him unpredictable. Tasarov wondered how many others like him were present in the four thousand, hiding their needs. Killing Wang would be a warning to them.

  “Who are you?” Wang asked. “You have no right.”

  But his eyes said the opposite: If you enforce your will, you have the right. It was the rule of history’s power gangs, from top to bottom. The best of them tried to appear as unganglike as possible, seeking legitimacy from a divine being, human reason, or mutual sympathy. But it had always been a gang—the tribe, the old school tie, the profession, the business. You had to join one, or be a gang of one—the most troublesome kind. The other gangs occasionally looked to the one to see what he might have, thinking that maybe they could get in on it; where the pathfinders went, the rest could follow with less fear. Sometimes they made a hero of the one, so they could park their lost ideals somewhere, so the gang of one, if he was distinguished enough to make them doubt, would not shame them when he came into his kingdom.

  As a prison, this place was no worse than landside prisons. Maybe better in several ways, worth keeping as peaceful as it had been these last years. Worthy enough to get rid of unstables like Wang.

  There was no struggle here for anything except flesh, and that was pretty nearly divvied up, with few changes or trades. Those who chose no one had faithful Madame Palm, or nothing. Most everyone wanted peace after five years. It was an attainable prize, after all the others had turned illusory or too costly to seek. Power couldn’t have much here, because raising soldiers to enforce it was difficult. What could you pay them if you didn’t have them already to get what you needed to pay them? No enterprise was worthwhile, since food and shelter were givens before any game could begin. Those who had tried to control food and shelter had failed with the same problem of soldiers.

  Wang was news and excitement. He brought a sense of life and danger. To kill him might not do. The suspense of watching out for him might even be useful.

  “Wang—you will have your life,” Tasarov said, and saw a questioning look spread through the crowd. “But—every day you will thank ten of us for your life, such as it is, until all have been thanked. Do you agree?”

  Wang looked up with surprise. Then, very slowly, he nodded, and Tasarov knew that there was more, that something had finally broken him inside.

  Suddenly Wang threw himself on his face and cried out, “I will never see my beloved again! What have I done?”

  Tasarov saw the feelings that washed through the tormented soul. The man had lusted after Howes a long time, hoping for a happier intimacy. When Howes rejected him, loss, humiliation, and terror had assaulted him as one. Rage uncoiled from where it had been waiting, followed by visions of revenge upon Howes. Wang’s act of revenge through the attempted sexual conversion of the object to his need had brought the death of his beloved who refused to be turned to his need. Loss of love, companionship, sexual completion, hope, and the irrevocable loss of the object itself, now warred with pride, which rode above the internal battlefield intent on killing even the wounded.

  Wang took the knife, rolled over onto his back, and slowly pushed the point into his heart.

  No one cheered as the blood flowed out; too many saw the innards of a kindred organism strewn across their own private landscapes.

  ■

  Tasarov was asked to sit in judgment at least once a month, sometimes two or three times. But he wondered whether he was a plausible authority or simply better than none. He was happy to settle simple disputes, because these usually followed a gamelike strategy, in which it was straightforward to expose the goal of each participant and then give each of them something for their trouble; but when he felt intimations of violence involving inconsolable passions, whose causes wound backward in time through abused and tormented personalities, he sought to separate the participants as best he could, and hoped to be proven wrong about their future acts of violence.

  It rarely happened. They beat, raped, tormented, and murdered each other as if following a schedule, following the statistical regularity of the twenty-one card trick, in which the eleventh card never failed to appear. He could imagine much worse. What startled him was the amount of orderly behavior that endured.

  He sometimes woke up in the middle of his night, and saw humanity as a single vast creature with billions of heads, its arms and legs struggling with itself. A piece of that creature had been amputated, placed inside this Rock, and sent out to strangle itself in the darkness.

  17

  …But You Have not Heard

  JUDGE OVERTON’S PRIVATE CHAMBER

  * * *

  “Males are strong, and natural selection has made them champion impregnators of women. The weaker males just weren’t as successful. Yet civilization tells the strong to restrain themselves—raise one family at a time, hold back from all other possible females. But nature says get as many as you can, veiling its program with promises of pleasurable domination. What can you ever expect from this, except rape at every opportunity—for the strong, I mean, and mental illness for the weak? We might as well select out the strong and ruthless ones and ship them out, however we can. Will this solve the problem of rape? Not really; as long as there are weaker and stronger, it will go wrong between men and women, women and women, and men and men. Not always. Sometimes.”

  * * *

  “Abebe!” Leibniz’s voice called from the dark.

  She sat shivering, with her shirt pulled down to cover her as much as possible.

  “It’s getting colder!” he shouted.

  She wanted her clothing, but if he got close enough, she would be helpless again. This had been coming for some time, she knew, as she had flirted with their repressed violence and lust for her; something in her had let them stalk her in their secret selves, disbelieving that it could ever happen, but curious about which one would be first to break his reserve.

  Now they had done so in cowardly darkness, to stifle their fears, like chimps who masturbated when afraid. What had she expected? That one of them would so impress her with his genuine ardor and that she would welcome him into her citadel?

  “Abebe! You must have your clothes.”

  She wondered which one she had kicked so well. Not the one who now wanted to bring her the clothes. Well, she would sit here, at odds with herself, “until the day break, and the shadows flee away,” as the poet said, even though there was no Sun to rise and she might never see her shadow again.

  And something in her wept at this brutal courting she had found instead of a romantic fantasy. No other might ever find her again, as John Sakaro had found her, with his we
althy storybook ways, tall with a soft voice and deep brown eyes. She had never questioned her professed love for him; she had no right but to insist that she loved him, even though she knew the lie within herself, and that it waited to poison her soul after everything else had been taken away from her.

  That time was now, all around her.

  “Abebe!” cried the night.

  And then it flickered, coloring the landscape between black moments, creating and destroying from moment to moment. Somewhere, she realized, repair systems were at work, striving to light her eyes and warm her body; but they would not be able to banish the deeper chill that oppressed her.

  As the flickering continued, she wondered how she could live among these people again. The sewing circle was suddenly an odd domesticity that had given her more than she had valued, despite her mockery of its participants.

  In the runaway flickering, she saw Leibniz coming down the path toward her. He was carrying her shorts and underpants. She wanted to get up and run, but froze as if before an approaching train.

  He stopped and looked down at her.

  “Here,” he said, dropping her clothes into her lap. “We’re not all animals—but I’ll confess I also wanted you, and still do.”

  She looked up at him, but it was impossible in the flickering to glimpse his face. He seemed to be grimacing. The interval slowed. He was staring at her, as if about to tell her something, but after a few moments turned away and went back up the path.

  “Lono’s dead,” he shouted back to her. “Your kick snapped his neck.”

  Shaken by the revelation, she reached for her clothes. The sunplate stopped flickering suddenly and stayed on at about half strength.

  She looked toward the sewing circle, and saw that Lenin, Newton, and Trotsky had met Leibniz on the path. They were whispering among themselves. Behind them, Stalin’s body was just barely visible in the tall grass.

  The four men stopped whispering and came toward her. She hurried to put her clothes on.