Fighting Gravity

by Leah Petersen

  I looked at Pete. His face was set in his neutral, expressionless emperor’s mask. The effort he was putting into maintaining it looked painful. He was positioned so that he was facing me, his head turned in the right direction so any spectator would think he was looking at me. But he wasn’t. I didn’t take my eyes off of him so that when he did look at me I wouldn’t miss it.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw Lord Sifer move forward.

  “Jacob Dawes.”

  I looked at him as a reflex. He was regarding me as he always did, dispassionate and calm. In all the time I’d known Lord Sifer I’d never gotten the impression that he disapproved of me, but I hadn’t gotten the impression that he approved of me either. It wasn’t hard to believe that the man held no actual opinions of his own; that every situation was evaluated on the bare facts and circumstances alone. He was the perfect politician.

  Lord Sifer continued to address me but I looked back at Pete, waiting for his reaction, or just for him to look at me.

  “Mr. Dawes, you have been accused and found guilty of gross disrespect of the person and position of His Excellence, Emperor Rikhart IV, willful defiance of a direct order of Emperor Rikhart IV, and violence against the person of Emperor Rikhart IV. These charges amount to treason. Have you anything to say in your defense?”

  Addressing Pete, I said, “I have done what you said. I am guilty of treason. But I beg His Excellence to forgive me and show mercy.”

  There was a collective boo from around the courtyard. Pete betrayed no reaction at all.

  Lord Sifer continued, “The penalty for treason is death by beheading. However, His Excellence has decided to extend mercy and commute the sentence of death.” The crowd booed once again, louder this time. I wanted to smirk at them but I felt too miserable to do it. “Instead, Mr. Dawes, you are hereby banished from the person and presence of His Excellence, Emperor Rikhart IV in perpetuity. You will be taken from here to a Resettlement camp, and from there into permanent Resettlement, where you will stay for the rest of your natural life. Any attempt to see, contact, or be in proximity to His Excellence or to leave the area where you are Resettled, will incur the immediate sentence of death.”

  The crowd was grumbling, by no means mollified. “In addition,” Lord Sifer resumed, “you are sentenced to a public judicial flogging, forty strokes of the birch, to be carried out immediately.” There was a murmur through the crowd at this that sounded at least somewhat appeased. They wouldn’t get their beheading, but this was something; the next best thing.

  I shivered.

  Still I watched Pete, waiting, hoping. I stared at him, trying to force him to meet my eye, only once. This was the last time I would see him. I’d been so determined the night before to make a clean, swift break, but suddenly I couldn’t leave without him looking at me one more time. I needed him to look at me.

  He did not, and I was led away.

  I was brought to stand before the birching frame and stripped naked. A birching is a nasty version of flogging, designed to humiliate as well as inflict pain. The frame was no more than a bar at a height just above my middle that I was bent over; a thick strap held me in place around my waist. My ankles were shackled together, shackles were put around my wrists and all these attached to loose chains on the ground. The effect was that I was more or less dangling freely with my butt presented for the beating. I could not reach the ground with my hands or feet, or the posts on either side. The chains were long enough that I had a good bit of slack without being able to reach up and free myself. I had no way to brace myself.

  Which was the point. It was a psychological trick, to give the victim the illusion of having the ability to escape the torment, and to make it practically impossible not to kick and thrash around in an undignified manner. Though what dignity there was left to me with my naked ass in the air waiting for a very public spanking I couldn’t imagine.

  The birching stick was a hefty bundle of thick birch switches, soaked in water, bound tightly for most of the length but loose at the end. The proportion, then, of the size of the implement to the total area of the target was appalling. The man who administered the beating was chosen for his strength and trained in techniques to extract the maximum pain possible.

  And to top it all off, I’m confident that once I was thus trussed up, there was a deliberate delay of quite a few minutes so that I hung for an agonizing length of time in my humiliating position, in dread of when the beating would start.

  But eventually I heard, over the buzz of voices, the sound of footsteps to my left and then, with no other warning, the first blow came crashing down.

  I had been under no delusions that I would be able to bear a forty-stroke flogging stoically. Still I had resolved to try, or at least, do as well as I could. That first blow nearly made me cry, and not just because it hurt more than anything I’d ever experienced. Thirty-nine more of such sounded like the end of the world.

  And so, after only fifteen blows, all my efforts came to naught and for the balance of the beating I was howling, wailing, and thrashing about in desperation, just as I was intended to. I lost any remaining shred of dignity. Not that dignity was much on my mind at that point. I’d have given away any dignity I had then or would ever have just to spare myself one blow. To make matters worse, I lost count somewhere and experienced the added agony of not knowing how much longer it would go on.

  The beating felt interminable, and yet, it did end. I almost didn’t realize it was over; I was near delirious with pain. I only became aware of the fact when they began to unshackle me. I was helped down off the frame and two men carried me away. I could barely see but I wanted to try to catch at least a glimpse of Pete one more time, but they never turned me to face him and I was so weak I couldn’t even stand on my own. Outside the courtyard, a loose robe was put on me and I was helped down tortuously long hallways until I was brought to an empty lounge just outside the public arrival/departure platform.

  It was only when I was being lowered onto a couch that I realized one of the men helping me was Jonathan. He gave me a pained, sympathetic look.

  “How are you?”

  “I’ve been better,” I croaked. My voice was nearly nonexistent from screaming.

  He began to mop my face with a cool, wet towel. Before long I heard Dr. Henriksen’s voice.

  “Jacob, I’m going to tend to your wounds now. Try to hold still, I’ll be as gentle as I can.”

  It surprised me that it would be Dr. Henriksen who would come. She was Pete’s personal physician and saw only the most important people at the palace. She’d been my doctor while I’d been with Pete, but I hadn’t expected she’d be the one to see me now.

  I reached over and grabbed her arm. “Something for the pain would be nice.”

  She gave me a sad look. Jonathan’s face was similar. “I’m sorry, Jacob, I’m not allowed to do that. It’s part of the punishment. No pain medication for seven days.”

  Seven days? I cried as she cleaned and bandaged my rear end. I’m sure she was being gentle, but it hurt like a son of a bitch anyway.

  When she had finished she bid me goodbye and left. Jonathan helped me up and into a pair of loose pants and a shirt. I was about to collapse back onto the couch when Pete entered the room.

  He stopped in front of me.

  “Lie down, Jake, you look terrible.”

  I just shook my head. His eyes were red and puffy. In spite of myself I reached out and touched his face. A tear rolled down and onto my hand. He put his hand over mine and turned his face to kiss my palm.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered fiercely. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Stop it,” I protested, though my voice was weaker than I would have liked. “Stop.”

  We stood for a time just looking at each other, Jonathan still supporting my weight on one side. Finally Pete removed a ring from his finger.

  It was a simple ring with only one black stone in the setting. In all the time I’d known Pete, I’d never seen h
im dressed and not wearing that ring; even when he wore no other jewelry, even when he didn’t wear the Imperial seal. I looked at him but he was looking at the ring.

  “It’s a true black diamond,” he said, still not looking up. “From Earth. One of the last mined here. It was given to Emperor Nathaniel II nearly three hundred years ago as a wedding present from his bride. He was one of the few emperors who ever married for love. He wore the ring every day after that. On his deathbed he gave the ring to his son and heir, and he wore it all his reign.”

  He held out an empty hand by way of a request. I put mine in it. He slid the ring onto my littlest finger.

  “And so the tradition has been, for all this time. My father gave this to me the day before he died. It’s actually the only thing he ever gave me himself.

  “Over all this time the ring’s come to symbolize many things. But I see it as a symbol of family. Because it was originally given in love and worn out of dedication to another. And because of the way I received it, one of the few times in my life my father ever spoke to me as a son. I intended to pass this ring along at the end of a long life filled with family I loved and that loved me.”

  There was a long silence. “I know how you feel about rings.” He looked up, meeting my eye, and gave me a sad smile. “But I want you to have it.”

  “Pete, I can’t—”

  “It’s fitting it should go with you,” he interrupted, looking down again. His voice dropped to almost a whisper. “Another thing I thought I’d never part with.”

  “Pete…” I started but I couldn’t continue. He took my face in his hands and kissed me, a fierce, desperate kiss. As soon as he pulled away, he turned and ran from the room.

  “Pete!”

  He did not stop or turn around. He was gone.

  fg28

  I sank back down onto the couch and sobbed. Before long, Jonathan told me it was time for me to leave. He helped me up and out onto the public departure platform. I boarded, flanked by guards. All the hustle and bustle of hundreds of people coming and going stopped around me. I made my way onto the windowless, mobile brig in ringing silence.

  Jonathan lowered me to the bed in the claustrophobic, muddy-gray cell. He stood over me, silent, his face grim.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “For all the trouble I’ve been. Everything I put you through. But you should be okay, now. Now that you don’t have me to screw things up for you.”

  “I’m glad you’re leaving,” he said.

  The words hit me in the gut and I discovered it was possible to feel worse than I already did.

  “Oh.” It was weak and pathetic.

  “You misunderstand,” he said, his voice gentle. “It’s better for you. Safer. It’s too dangerous for you here. I’m very glad to see you leaving. Alive.” He watched me, intensely, emotions I couldn’t untangle playing across his face. “And I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

  “For what?”

  “For my part in this.”

  I was still reeling but that hurt too, that I’d made him feel guilty.

  “It wasn’t your fault. You tried to warn me about the money and I didn’t listen.”

  He bit off a bitter laugh. “If it were as simple as that—”

  A burly guard stepped up behind Jonathan. “Visiting hours are over,” he spat.

  Jonathan tossed a glare at him but turned back to me without protest. “Goodbye, Jacob Dawes. I’ll take care of him for you. Better than I took care of you.”

  I didn’t get a chance to answer that, even if I’d been able. The guard bullied Jonathan out of the cell and snapped the door shut behind him.

  -

  We traveled for two days. I never left my cell and saw only the doctor and the guards who brought my meals. I slept most of that time, exhausted in every way. When I couldn’t sleep, I thought of Pete. Of us. Of there no longer being an “us,” of there never being one again.

  After the second night, we stopped at a landing area and boarded a shuttle that took us to the docking station in orbit. I hadn’t been told where I was going, and didn’t think I would be if I asked, but I hadn’t even considered being taken off-planet. Was I going to be Resettled on another world entirely? It was possible that my homeworld was lost to me now and I’d gotten no more of a goodbye than a few polluted breaths between the transport and the shuttle.

  I went into space not as a fresh-faced, fascinated scientist this time, but as a trembling, broken criminal. It made the experience quite different.

  We boarded a cargo transport apparently chosen for its ability to go only fast enough to avoid being sucked into the gravity of the nearby planets. I was alone in a tiny, windowless cell. My meals were delivered through a slot in the wall, and I began to feel as if I were fading away, as if I’d ceased to exist for anyone but myself. It was a disturbing, twitchy feeling. It also left me a horrific amount of time to think. It took us five days to reach our destination: a dwarf planet or large asteroid on the edge of the solar system. When they came for me at last, I left the cell feeling small and contemptible.

  I was handcuffed—though where they thought I was going to run to, I couldn’t imagine—and taken from the shuttle into the facility through a long above-ground tunnel. At regular intervals, small windows looked out over the barren surface and the stars beyond.

  Two guards waited for us inside the building in a sterile metal-and-poly room. I was handed off like cargo and the new guards led me down a hallway to a small room where I was ordered to strip. After so many days alone, I was desperate for human interaction, but when I talked, they did not respond. Instead, once I was naked, I was thoroughly searched and then handed the standard-issue garb: brown pants, brown shirt, and shoes of an indifferent color. I wasn’t given anything of my own back. Including Pete’s ring.

  “That ring’s—”

  “You’ll get your things back if you leave.”

  If?

  From there I was taken into an office that showed more sign of human habitation than I’d seen so far. There were enough pictures on the walls and the assorted paraphernalia of work that it looked broken-in. The display read “Captain Saubers.”

  Seated behind the desk was a hard-looking, silver-haired man in an Imperial Security uniform. He nodded once to the guards and they left the room.

  He examined me in silence for a minute. “You’re a problem for me, boy.”

  “Yeah, I get that a lot,” I grumbled.

  His mouth twitched. “Do you even know where you are, son?”

  “No, sir.”

  “This is a Class C Settlement, Designation 14R2. The inmates call it Dead End. It’s a good name, because that’s what it is for them.”

  Resettlement is such a ubiquitous, such a normal concept that everyone thinks they know all about it and understand it, the way the concept of prisons made so much sense before society got fed up—and ran out of room, besides.

  In reality, we do know about it, and yet we don’t. After all, no one can say they have a brother or cousin or aunt who is Resettled, because once someone’s Resettled, they’re no one’s brother or cousin or aunt anymore. I had a father once and then, one day, I didn’t—as if I were Jesus himself, son of a virgin, or the Buddha, son of a dream. Meanwhile, some man out there in a Resettlement camp looked like the father I once had. He was getting clean and working hard, or dead because he didn’t and wasn’t. And he was no one’s father or husband or son.

  I went off to Resettlement knowing exactly what to expect, and not knowing what to expect at all. I didn’t even know who I was anymore.

  “You’re an oddity here,” Captain Saubers said. “Among a campful of oddities. See, what I’ve got here are lifers. You know what that means?”

  “Here for life, I assume.”

  “You knew that happened before just now?”

  I hadn’t. Unlike most people, I had been in a position to know things like that. And maybe I should have thought of it then, to find out about all this. How it worked. Wh
at to expect once they finally got rid of me. Because, standing there, I realized that part of me always knew they would. Though I’d expected the quick and final boot, the beheading, or the less quick but just as final hanging, the less honorable way to be dispatched for public spectacle. I knew better than to think I’d get the intense but anonymous trip through the incinerator.

  Instead I got the dubious mercy of Resettlement.

  “So I’m here for good?”

  “No, that’s the problem. I have lifers here, but now I’ve got you too, and they tell me, even though they sent you all the way out here, that you’re just facing the standard three- to six-month term before they dump you off wherever they’re going to put you, like all the other Resets.”

  “So why am I here?”

  “Hell if I know. Though if I had to guess, I’d say you’ve made some nasty enemies. Hardly a surprise there.”

  For one horrible moment I wondered if Pete was behind sending me here. But I wouldn’t let myself think about it. I couldn’t afford to care if he had.

  “So in three to six I get out and get Resettled somewhere?”

  “I’d expect closer to six than three. They sent you all the way out here, after all. That’s a lot of trouble to go to. I don’t expect they’ll be rushing back to get you at the first opportunity.”

  No, I didn’t expect they would either. And, though I didn’t say anything, I wouldn’t let myself believe that they really would come back for me at all. It was too easy and convenient for them to “forget” I was there, once they’d gotten me so far away. Or maybe I just wouldn’t survive this. Dying in Resettlement camps was common enough that it was considered one of the outcomes anyone could look forward to. Natural means and accidents wouldn’t even be blinked at.

  “What makes them lifers? Why aren’t they Resettled too?”

  “Not fit for living in lawful society anymore. They should probably all be executed, but there’s got to be a line somewhere, I suppose. And they’re not all so bad. Just can’t seem to work out how to live with law-abiding people. Some have done no worse than stealing a mouthful of bread, but they do it every time. Reset, then right back again. They only get a couple of chances, at the most. Usually no more than one. But someone somewhere can’t see the way to ‘cinerating them for petty crimes, even though they’ll probably never stop. So they get sent to one of the Settlements. There aren’t many. And it’s not commonly known that they exist. Wouldn’t want people to think there’s an option like this. Some might take us up on it rather than stay in whatever shithole they’ve fallen into.”