Brute Orbits

by George Zebrowski

  Some people claimed to be innocent of everything, and maybe they were. She believed that everyone had their own good reasons for what they had to do to get here, and those reasons were likely enough for that person; no one else needed to hear them. If one had to tell others about it, then something was wrong with the reasons. Real ones kept you going, and no one else.

  She was free even though imprisoned; but if she ever thought she was no longer free within herself, she would kill herself.

  She had gotten to know more than a dozen of her fellow inmates, and the pictures they painted in her mind were enough to make her shudder. These women made each other afraid. In a ground prison, they had all been in solitary because no one would risk further violence from them. Here they were bemused by how far they could walk in any direction, and how no one would try to stop whatever they did; and no one would protect them. She could see the confusion on their faces, as clear as if they were wearing chains. They didn’t like it. They simmered inside with fear and hatred of others and of themselves, afraid that they might do something to get themselves injured or killed. Lonnie Beth almost laughed when she read their faces, but it shook her to see how much she was in control of herself while the others weren’t.

  Three of them she watched very carefully. Carmella Frank, a police officer from Memphis, had shot her partner and three female suspects in the back a dozen times each. She never talked about what she had done, but somehow the word had followed her to Rock Seven. Kelly Rowe Lyone had killed six husbands for their insurance, and collected on all but the last, who lived long enough to call the police and point them to copies of the other policies which she kept under her mattress. Gail Ford, it was said, had orgasms when she killed; whether the victim was a man or woman didn’t matter, but there had to be a robbery motive to sweeten it.

  Lonnie Beth was sure she was better than these three, at least, since she had acted in what would have been self-defense if she had waited for them to reach her. The other murders were all business, benefitting more people than they hurt. But these three women here were sickos of one kind or another; they had to kill, it seemed to her, from a deep need, for the sake of killing. They and others like them were dead women waiting, as far as she was concerned, for someone to kill them just to have peace of mind. Life was too long to have to worry about them here.

  As she sat on the back stairs to her barracks and looked out over the landscape of grass, mud, mess domes, sunplate, and the far rocky end of the hollow, she realized that she would die here. There was no escape, no repeal of sentence possible—unless the authorities of Earth came and turned the Rock around.

  She had to admit the finality of it. Inmates could do nothing but complain among themselves about the cruelty of it, as they slowly came apart. And they would, she realized; not the way people came apart in solitary, but in ways no one would ever know about on Earth. Too bad, they’d say, but there’s nothing we can do about it.

  She had to admire the practicality of it: find an island in the sky, fill it with the unwanted, then hurl it outward and never think about it again. Some Rocks came back, she knew, or were supposed to come back; but it depended on how much people back home cared about the inmates, whether they had any family or friends who wanted them back.

  Carmella Frank came out and sat down next to her. Lonnie Beth tensed as the cop smiled at her with her perfect teeth.

  “You know,” Carmella said, “I think there are guards here.”

  “What do you mean?” Lonnie Beth asked.

  Carmella looked at her and smiled again. “They’re here, but we just don’t know who they are. And you know what that means?”

  “What?”

  “We can bribe them. Hold them hostage. Find a way to break out.”

  “Bribe them with what?” Lonnie Beth asked, trying to sound somewhat interested. There was no point in getting the woman mad at her.

  Carmella grinned sheepishly. “Well, maybe we’ll have to hold them hostage. And you know what else?”

  “What?” Lonnie Beth answered.

  “This place isn’t really moving. It’s just a cavern on the Moon somewhere. They fooled us. You know what that means? We can get out.”

  “No. We’re moving.”

  “How can you know?”

  “This place spins to give us gravity. Don’t you ever notice that you just don’t feel the same way when you walk as back home? Drop something and it doesn’t fall straight.”

  “Well…but there’s an engineering level. Wherever we are, maybe there are shuttles we can use to get out.”

  “How do we get there?”

  “We dig straight down!”

  “No shovels.”

  “With our hands, if we have to!”

  Looking at her, Lonnie Beth knew that the woman was completely gone, and not likely to come back. A drop of perspiration trembled on her upper lip.

  “Did you ever dig with your hands?” Lonnie Beth asked her, wondering why she was bothering to try to make sense to her. “It’s not that easy.”

  “I can do it,” she said softly, with a grim resolve that came out of her like icy knives. “I can swim through steel if I set my mind to it.”

  ■

  She was out every day, digging in the grass. Women gathered around to watch, but not Lonnie Beth. She did not wish to see Carmella trying to dig a tunnel out of her life; it was pathetic, not the way to prepare for the life that would have to be lived here.

  Lonnie Beth did not yet know what that life would be, but she would find it in the same way she had learned what kind of life was possible for her back on Earth. She had taken for herself what she could not have had in any other way, and for that life and her defense of it she had been imprisoned as a criminal. People with much greater power than she had ever held took much more, including the lives of the lesser, than she had ever done.

  But after a week she went out to see what Carmella was doing. Something about the woman’s dedicated imaginings had gotten to Lonnie Beth, and she had to try to understand.

  She made her way through the usual gathering of about fifty women, and came to the edge of a hole in the ground.

  Carmella sat at the bottom, some five feet down, digging with her hands.

  “I’m getting out,” she sang to herself as she tossed handfuls of red dirt up over the edge. Her hands were raw. She had grown thin and pale. Black circles showed under her eyes as she glanced up. “I’m leaving!” she shouted. “Any time now!”

  Lonnie Beth felt her chest constrict as she looked at the woman who had been so dangerous and was now so destroyed; and she realized that she preferred the killer’s defiance and pride to the weak human being at the bottom of the hole. Such a humiliation might have meant something only if proud Carmella could have understood it; this creature could no longer be made to suffer in that way.

  A handful of bloody dirt landed near Lonnie Beth’s right foot.

  “It’ll be different for you!” Carmella shouted, then dug in again with both hands.

  What did she mean? That each would go insane in their own way? For the first time in her life Lonnie Beth felt afraid. Not even seeing the Rock from space when the prison shuttle had brought her out from the Moon—hanging in the abyss above some black floor, to which it might fall and shatter—had disturbed her as much as this woman at the bottom of a hole.

  Carmella looked up at her and smiled, and the icy knives came out of her eyes again—with triumph. “There!” she shouted. “I’m out of here!”

  Then, with hands deep in the dirt in front of her, Carmella stopped moving. A burst of air gurgled in her throat. She sat still like a statue.

  The crowd around the hole was very still; then it began to disperse, until only a few were left.

  “She’s gone,” Lonnie Beth said, and pushed some dirt forward with her foot until it fell over the edge and down on the motionless figure. There was nothing else to do.

  A few of the women stayed and helped her fill in the hole. Lonnie B
eth shut down her unwanted feelings as she buried the dead woman in the grave she had dug for herself.

  Weeks later, when the tough grass had grown back, Lonnie Beth looked toward the grave and couldn’t tell where it had been.

  19

  The Last One Left

  JUDGE OVERTON’S PRIVATE CHAMBER

  * * *

  “To do what would have to be done to prevent crime and criminals would cost more than anyone is willing to pay. Certainly the rich and powerful don’t want to pay it out of their pockets, the cheap, greedy bastards!”

  * * *

  Abebe felt a tug on her body.

  “Spin’s starting up again!” Gulliver cried. “Everyone hold on until it’s stable!”

  “If it gets stable,” his wife said.

  Abebe grasped her chair with both hands and held on. From outside, she heard a distant crying. Gradually, the tug seemed to lessen and she was able to sit in the chair without holding on.

  The crying outside seemed louder. She got up and took a few wobbly steps toward the mess entrance.

  The crying was even louder as she came to the exit.

  She stepped outside and looked toward the sunplate. The crying was coming from there. The spin axis was clear of floaters. The plate was a red-yellow, and there were black spots all over it.

  Gulliver and his wife came out and stood next to her.

  “It’s the floaters who didn’t swim down in time,” Gulliver said. “They’re on the grid that covers the plate. They should now be able to climb down, those who haven’t broken limbs or their necks.”

  “We should get out there,” Abebe said, thinking of the sewing circle.

  “Listen!” said Gulliver’s wife. “They’re calling for help.”

  Abebe said, “We’ll have to carry back the injured and dispose of the dead.”

  Gulliver nodded. “We’ll see how well we can follow the medical instructions of the diagnostic scanners.”

  ■

  All that afternoon, the injured hobbled back to the mess halls and barracks. Those unable to walk stayed where they were, waiting for help. Some of the able-bodied went gladly; others showed no interest.

  The dead who were found below the sunplate, or hung up in the latticework screen that covered the glowing circle, were brought to the mess hall recycling chutes and sent down. No one wanted to bury them.

  Abebe went with Gulliver and his wife, to see if any of the sewing circle had survived. It disturbed and surprised her to think that she cared at all after what had happened.

  As they approached the plate, the sight of those who had died from broken necks or backs made her uneasy and then unwell. She went off by herself into the grass and threw up.

  Most of those who could walk were already gone, so it became a matter of seeking out those who were still down but not dead, and needing a shoulder to lean on. She feared finding someone with a broken back who could not be moved, and would have to be left to die.

  They came to a group of men and women resting in the grass, recovering from their ordeal. They were haggard and bemused, trying to get themselves together for the trek back to their living quarters.

  As she scanned the group, she suddenly saw a familiar figure. Lenin was sitting cross-legged on the grass, alone, breathing heavily. She looked around for the others, but couldn’t spot them. She went up to him. He looked up as if he didn’t know her. She sat down in front of him and waited to see if he would come out of shock.

  “Are you all right, Goran?” she asked, calling him by his rightful name.

  He nodded, looking for a moment like a young boy who had been whipped within an inch of his life. “You know, Abebe,” he said, “I expected to be sent away for my politics. It was a risk I knew about. But I did not expect to live through a reasonable facsimile of a descent into hell.”

  “But you didn’t burn,” she said.

  He sighed. “The others… I saw them die.” He gestured toward the sunplate grid. “They’re still up there.”

  She looked up and saw that there were several human figures still left in the latticework. They showed only as silhouettes against the red-yellow glow.

  She touched his hand, as if she had become someone else, and said, “I guess you win by default,” thinking that she could not afford to lose the last one. He was a bastard, but he was her bastard; and maybe he would never be one again. She now had the choice of making something of what was left, or living in the wreckage.

  She took his hand and held it. He looked at her, squinting through tired eyes out of a bruised and lacerated face, then said, “I’m sorry.”

  20

  A Lamp Unto Himself

  As the twenty-first century aged, humanity worried and worked at its global problems with growing effect. It both adapted to global warming and mounted heroic and ultimately successful measures to reverse it. There was simply too much at stake for practical reason to be clouded by politics.

  At the same time the growing need to care for an aging population that began in the twentieth century found its natural result in the lengthening of lifespan. Finally, under the threat of worldwide social chaos, indefinite lifespan was accepted as the natural goal of medicine. Disease was accepted at long last as belonging to the evolutionary competition among the organisms of the Earth, as natural selection by the environment to bring up fitter models of organisms; but now, as the human spirit sought to light its own way, the old standards of fitness were being revised. The human genome sang of the possibilities beyond mere adaptations to nature’s niches.

  As the century of bio-engineering found its way, offering control of reproduction and general health, natural selection became increasingly irrelevant as a method for human betterment. Humankind was quickly moving toward physiological improvement through its own efforts, outside the bloody default settings of nature.

  The immediacy of pushing away the old horizon of death changed every society on Earth, forcing them into an intolerable but productive contradiction: Humanity could not long live in the two worlds of short-timers and longlifers.

  Long life rewarded the shrinking of populations, even as diseases had their last go at the human body, which could now be adapted to meet every new illness with immediately engineered responses that could be infinitely adjusted to any resistant organisms that arose, in a perpetual embrace of responses.

  Later historians commented that “Death had no chance against an ambitious middle class.” For this growing body of aging-healthy who later became longlifers, the young no longer served the needs of personal survival; this bond was broken as decisively as had been the link between sexual pleasure and reproduction in the previous century. In the transition years, the face of violent youth became especially fearful. “You will not invade our world!” cried the coming longlifers.

  As the AIs increasingly made prescriptions in both politics and economics, humankind initially opposed them; but as the disinterested prescriptions proved productive, no one dared or wanted to oppose them. Business flocked to the education of better AIs, which outran humanity in speed and threatened to achieve a much expected but ambivalently judged critical mass of consciousness. Here also humankind knew that embrace would be necessary to avoid leaving the human mind behind: as AIs evolved, they would also help humankind change itself, as often as was necessary to keep up.

  But Great Clarke’s hope—that “politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past,” and that the time would come when “these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies”—was not to be fulfilled very easily. Competition for power and the distinction of credit for work done continued among human beings; but already those who kept power through profit and investment were in the hands of experts into whose skills they had given their lives. And these experts sought satisfying lives in their work, and not in the accumulation of wealth and power which had now
here to go and nothing to do.

  Later AI management of economies confirmed Clarke’s hope that since “politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth,” they should not be the “primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men.” Alter human lifespans, bring mature technologies online, and we will have a better polity.

  Nevertheless, even as humankind’s right hand worked for betterment, its juvenile left hand carried on with its criminal empires; but these became strangely muted, by the standards of past ages, and were based more on personal antipathies and humiliations than on simple greed. There were still too many ways to gain distinction outside the law for mindful, willful individuals to ignore. A twentieth century judgment on the ineradicability of crime in free societies, a conclusion that had counted crime as the cost of certain levels of freedom, would have seen the societies of the twenty-first and early twenty-second century as being nearly without crime. Crimes of passion still existed: assault and murder. Theft of large amounts of wealth existed—but more as a game of information-siege than mugging at gunpoint. Odd crimes still existed in remote places on the Earth and in various settlements throughout the solar system; but in the great urban centers of offworld habitats and surface communities, a better grade of human being was being born and raised. Some said it was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, with wool so thick that even the wolf rarely guessed his own true nature.

  It was this changing humanity that looked out into the dark, and wondered what had happened to its million exiles. Awareness of them swept Earth’s Sunspace when the first timed habitat came back in 2105—twenty-five years later than scheduled.

  “The first one is back!” shouted the news.

  “So late!”

  “What happened?”

  No one had an answer; the records lay buried in electronic archives that could only be viewed with great difficulty on outmoded machines. But there were only two possible answers: There had either been a mistake in the initial boost velocity, or it had been done deliberately. That some chance encounter had altered the prison habitat’s long orbit was discounted as unlikely.